Ashley Strong had just stopped her car at Kennedy and Norwood avenues on Pittsburgh’s North Side to drop off her friend.

Cedrick L. Mack was supposed to be meeting someone named Reese on the afternoon of Dec. 18, 2019.

Strong saw the person he was supposed to meet walking up the hill toward them, but as Mack was getting out of Strong’s car, he grabbed her and pulled her toward the floor.

“Ced pulls me down, and my ears (were) ringing at the first shot,” Strong testified Wednesday.

She had been wounded.

“After he pulled me down, the next thing I know, I saw the gun and it shot him in the back of the head,” Strong said.

Mack, 41, of Duquesne, died at the scene.

The person known as Reese, later identified as Maurice Demond King, 29, of Turtle Creek, is on trial this week, charged with criminal homicide and aggravated assault.

He was identified by Pittsburgh police through the use of video surveillance, license plate camera readers and witness statements.

On Wednesday, Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Berosh asked a jury in her opening statement to find King guilty of first-degree murder.

But defense attorney Frank Walker said in his opening that the prosecution would be unable to meet its burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt because its witnesses are unreliable.

“You won’t hear about a murder weapon,” he told the jury.

A criminal complaint filed in the case said officers responding to the scene that day were able to follow footprints in the snow from the crime scene to the Steelworkers Towers Apartments on Perrysville Avenue.

Berosh told the jury that would be an important part of the case — that King used that building as his base.

Additionally, in tracing the footprints, she said officers also were able to track video surveillance from the community that appeared to show the suspect change clothes and emerge carrying a bag.

The complaint said the person later identified as King could be spotted on video walking toward the building’s garbage chute carrying his clothing and then emerging with his hands empty.

The clothes were later found by detectives in the building’s dumpster.

“Why would someone do that?” Berosh asked.

While at the apartment building, police said they learned that King, who signed in that morning as “Reese,” was there visiting his grandmother.

Strong, who was shot through her right wrist and grazed on her left shoulder, was the first prosecution witness called.

She said she had grown up on the same street as Mack, and that he had asked her to drive him from McKeesport to the North Side that afternoon. He told her he was meeting up with his “boy.”

There had been a bad snowstorm, Strong said, and the roads were icy. When they got to the address on Shelton Avenue where Mack was supposed to meet Reese, there was no one there, she testified. The two men were on the phone, and Strong testified that she heard the man on the other end say that he could see them, and that he was walking up the hill toward them.

Strong then saw a man approaching in dark clothing.

After the shooting ended, Strong ran up the street looking for help. A couple called 911 and gave Strong first aid.

Berosh played the 911 call for the jury.

“There’s a girl running around in the intersection yelling, ‘Please help me,’” the man said in the call. “She’s yelling she’s shot. She’s shot.”

When the neighbor got to Strong, he tried to calm her down and then wrapped a towel around the wound in her wrist.

When the 911 call taker asked who shot her, Strong said she didn’t know. But then she added, “His name was Reese.”

Copyright ©2025— Trib Total Media, LLC (TribLIVE.com)