\u201cThey got nothing, and that\u2019s because there\u2019s a simple reason: My client didn\u2019t have a motive. She didn\u2019t do it,\u201d defense lawyer Jonathan Strauss said.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.funminews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/deliajohnson13207143151584321245.jpg?resize=696%2C448\")
Johnson was holding court with a group of people by a stoop on Franklin Ave. at Prospect Place in Crown Heights at about 9:40 p.m. Aug. 4, 2021, wearing a bright red dress, when a blonde woman in a black outfit walked out of a double-parked white Mercedes, shot her in the head, then fired again after she hit the ground.
The shooter then calmly walked off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The people of Franklin Ave. had gathered for a funeral, for a man by the name of Red,\u201d Diamond told jurors Monday. \u201cThis defendant chose to take that celebration and forced the people of Franklin Ave. to watch as she gunned down Delia Johnson \u2014 cold-blooded murder.\u201d
Banton can be seen on video pulling up at the funeral in her white Mercedes earlier in the evening, and she became the center of attention as she walked out and talked to Johnson and others.
\u201cBut you\u2019ll see something change. You\u2019ll hear it too,’\u201d the prosecutor said. \u201cYou\u2019re going to see the demeanor change between the defendant and Delia Johnson. Delia is really starting to separate herself, move away from the defendant and that white Mercedes.\u201d
A parade of NYPD witnesses introduced jurors to video of the shooting, as well as body camera footage showing the chaos afterwards. Several police officers responding to another call heard the shots from nearby, and came running, while four cops with the 77th Precinct\u2019s Public Safety team rushed to the scene in an unmarked car.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some of the cops tried to manage the distraught crowd and perform CPR, pumping on Johnson\u2019s chest and trying to keep her pulse from fading before an ambulance arrived.
The Public Safety cops fanned out and frantically asked witnesses to describe the shooter, and got a half-wrong, half-right answer \u2014 the killer was a man with blue pants, who fled in a white Mercedes.
Within seconds, the four officers piled into their car and quickly found a car matching what they\u2019d heard but the driver wouldn\u2019t pull over. Officer Tiffany Martinez testified that she and her partners had to cut the Mercedes off to stop the car.
\u201cI got out of the car, and I approached the driver,\u201d she said, describing who she saw, a blonde woman in a black top, black pants and sneakers. She looked inside the car, saw no one else inside and saw no weapons, though she did spy some luggage, she testifies.
\u201cI swear to God I didn\u2019t see you! I\u2019m so sorry, I didn\u2019t see you,\u201d the driver told the officers. And because the driver was a she, not a he, the officers cut her loose within seconds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThat will be the last time you see the defendant look that way. After that, she can\u2019t look like that again,\u201d Diamond siad.
Investigators realized their mistake a couple of hours later, when they saw the footage of the shooting.
Diamond said detectives reviewed the body camera footage, and linked the Mercedes\u2019 license plate to a Claudia Williams in Georgia, one of the names and addresses Banton uses.
Police caught up with Banton in Jacksonville, Fla. in November 2021. Her hair was no longer blond, Diamond said.
Strauss argued that the detectives picked up the wrong woman, and likened the prosecution\u2019s argument to a well-made trailer for a bad movie.
\u201cThey left out a lot of stuff,\u201d he said, noting that prosecutors plan to introduce two identification witnesses who didn\u2019t see the shooting, one of whom hasn\u2019t laid eyes on Banton for 20 years.
\u201cYou\u2019ll see the person that actually shot Delia Johnson,\u201d Strauss said of the footage, \u201cAnd I\u2019ll submit to you, it isn\u2019t the woman sitting here.\u201d
The trial continues on Tuesday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A jury got to see the horrifying moment a woman with a gun shot a Brooklyn mom in the head in front of her friends \u2014 along with video of police unwittingly letting the alleged killer go because they mistakenly thought the culprit was a man. The chilling footage ran on the first day of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":13123,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international","category-lifestyle"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.funminews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/shooting-woman.jpg?fit=636%2C382&ssl=1","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13124"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13125,"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13124\/revisions\/13125"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}