The sun was shining and children got off a school bus nearby when Rondell Quantrell Dunn was gunned down in St. Paul’s Summit-University neighborhood as he walked home from work on a spring afternoon in 2017.
Though the shooter fled and the gun never found, Assistant Ramsey County Attorney Elizabeth Lamin told jury members in Ramsey County District Court this week they could be confident it was 21-year-old Matthew Garland who pulled the trigger.
Dunn’s death date, April 17, was not incidental, Lamin continued during her opening statements in Garland’s murder trial. He and his cousin, Silk Lesure, 24, targeted him on the one-year anniversary of Bobby Collins’ murder, she said.
Collins, 19, had been a gang member from St. Paul’s East Side, according to Lamin. Dunn, 25, had gang ties too, she told the jury, adding that Lesure and Garland were affiliated with rival gangs.
“This was not a random shooting,” Lamin said. “This was cold-blooded, and intentional.”
Dunn was walking home from his job at Jimmy John’s around 2 p.m. when he was shot twice on the 400 block of Albans Street. He later died at Regions Hospital.
Garland, the alleged shooter, faces charges of aiding and abetting first and second-degree murder for the benefit of a gang in Dunn’s death. Lesure, who allegedly drove Garland to and from the scene, was also initially charged with murder, but has since pleaded guilty to one count of aiding an offender after the fact in a deal reached with the state.
Garland’s defense attorney, Patricia Hughes, called Dunn’s death “tragic” in her opening statements Thursday, but told jurors her client is not to blame.
“This is (a case of) mistaken identity,” Hughes said.
Not only was her client not responsible for Dunn’s shooting, she continued, but she said he wasn’t even in the state at the time it took place.
He boarded a mega-bus with his mother back to their home in Chicago the previous day, Hughes said, adding that Garland’s mother’s testimony and receipts from their ticket purchases will help prove it.
She went on to say that not one of the state’s witnesses would testify to seeing Garland kill Dunn, and said the only person who would claim he was responsible for the murder would be Lesure, adding that Lesure should not be trusted.
“Silk Lesure has a motive … He made a deal with the state, a very generous deal,” Hughes said.
In exchange for his agreement to testify at Garland’s trial, Lesure avoided a murder conviction and faces a maximum sentence of about six years in prison when he is sentenced later this month, according to court records.
Hughes added that her client was not involved in a gang and suggested the state is floating that narrative to the jury as a “scare tactic.”
Lesure told the court during his plea hearing last year that both Garland and Dunn had been tied to feuding gangs, court records say.
In addition to his testimony, the state claims that DNA pulled from a red hat left behind at the scene of the slaying as well as grainy surveillance footage captured of the incident will further help prove Garland’s guilt.
The trial will resume Monday.