Pittsburgh man accused of threatening ex, killing her boyfriend

Matthew Lambert spent months harassing, stalking and threatening his ex-girlfriend, telling her it would be her fault when he killed her new boyfriend, police said.

He allegedly installed a tracking device on her car. A day later, her boyfriend Tre Valorie was dead.

A criminal complaint filed Wednesday against Lambert in connection with the May 8 shooting of Valorie details months of alleged threatening text messages and phone calls, as well as allegations that he stalked his ex and Valorie from bar to bar the night of the shooting.

The woman told police that she and Valorie began their night at Tramp’s Bar on Greentree Road, and Lambert – who is the father of her child – walked into the bar and asked to see Valorie outside, according to the criminal complaint.

Valorie obliged and then returned, telling his girlfriend that “Matt just told me he was going to pay someone to shoot me,” according to the complaint. They left, headed across the city to the North Side bar Rumerz, police said. Lambert followed in his car, but the couple eventually lost him, according to the complaint.

After the couple left Rumerz and Valorie got into the driver’s seat of his girlfriend’s car to drive them home, someone opened fire. The woman told police she felt a bullet buzz past her face and then felt blood on her leg. When the shooting stopped, she reached for Valorie and realized he had been shot in the head, according to the complaint.

Valorie, 26, was pronounced dead less than 24 hours later.

Surveillance footage from near Rumerz captured the shooting, and investigators allege it showed Lambert circling the block, waiting for the couple before he and another man opened fire, according to the complaint.

The woman said the car Lambert was seen driving in the surveillance footage was the same one he’d driven past her house for weeks, according to the complaint.

Police said hundreds of text message from Lambert to his ex-girlfriend include threats on her life as well as any man she was with, demands for sex, indications that he was following her and other threats. Police said Lambert wrote that the woman was making him “crazy,” and her seeing other men “eats me alive,” according to the complaint.

The woman told police she didn’t know how Lambert found them the night of the shooting, as they went to bars far from her neighborhood, police said. Investigators said they found a GPS tracker on her car, which they tracked back to Lambert.

In a series of texts from Lambert to his ex-girlfriend the day before the shooting, the complaint said Lambert expressed outrage that she had taken their child to Valorie’s home.

He allegedly told her she had no idea what she’d “just done,” ending the message with all capital letters: “It’s on you, I promise you on my mother,” according to the complaint.

Police arrested Lambert two days after the shooting on charges of stalking and making threats, court records show. He has been held in Allegheny County Jail without bail since then.

In addition to homicide, Lambert is also charged with conspiracy to commit homicide, aggravated assault, reckless endangerment and firearms violations. No one else has been charged in connection with the shooting.