“And it was like knocking [three] quick times on the door of unhappiness.”
– l’Etranger, Albert Camus
On the afternoon of March 21, 2021, three gunshots rang out in quick succession. Two bullets would find their target. As the gunman hurried away, 38-year-old Erick Crawford lay bleeding on the sidewalk across the street from the Broadway Lights Diner in midtown Kingston.
Driving a marked patrol SUV along Broadway, Kingston police officer Eduardo Alvarez was the first to respond, though he initially missed the bystanders trying to call his attention to the injured man on the ground. When he saw them pointing down Liberty Street, he brought the vehicle back around and exited it. “He was a black male,” explained Alvarez, testifying a year later from the witness stand in the ceremonial courtroom of the Ulster County Courthouse. “When I turned him over, there was blood on his lower extremities, on his pants. I went to check for a pulse, and he took a big gasp of air. I rolled him onto his back, and immediately began compressions.”
Chief assistant district attorney Emmanuel Nneji spoke politely but precisely with a faint Nigerian accent questioning the officer.
“Just another fellow human being and you had a duty to help him?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Can you tell us how much blood?” Shaking his head, officer Alvarez said he could not.
“It was just blood,” he replied.
The trial for the murder of Erick Crawford began on Tuesday, March 29, 2022, a year and a week after officer Alvarez began chest compressions. The man accused of the killing, 45-year-old Truvock Noble, has pled not guilty.
On a large flat screen attached to speakers in the courtroom, footage taken from two cameras outside the Kingston Pop Museum shows a man wearing a black hoodie, grey pants and red, white and black shoes walking along Broadway in no particular hurry. There are traffic cones along the road, because gas pipes and sewer lines are being repaired. A long trench has been dug and filled with gravel. The man in the hoodie crosses over toward the Broadway Lights Diner through the construction and day’s traffic.
According to Nneji’s narration, once across the street, the man in the video stops to lean on a short fence bordering an asphalt lot to reach down into his sock and adjust what Nneji alleges is a firearm he has stowed earlier.
The man then crosses to the diner and turns down Liberty Street, before confronting another man now known to be Erick Crawford.
Shots outside the window
Across the street from the diner, Maria Mendez was at home, in the front room of a first-floor apartment with her daughter, when she heard an argument just outside her window. It’s tone and volume frightened her.
“Stand up,” she heard a voice say. “Your day is over.”
Maria’s husband was painting a wall with a roller in a back bedroom when Maria called to him. Darwin Sandoval said Maria had asked him to go outside to check out the trouble. As he came into the living room, he heard gunshots just outside their window.
“I went outside to see,” Sandoval testified through a translator. “I saw the two of them. One on the ground. One standing over him. Then the man standing crossed to the other side [of the street]. He took off his hoodie, and there was a still something on his head. [a du-rag]. He walked to the end of the street, to the stop sign and turned right onto Prospect Street, and I never saw him again.”
Trying to keep him alive
Mauricio Martinez, a cook at the Broadway Lights Diner, was in the kitchen of the restaurant chopping vegetables for a salad when he heard the gunshots and ran out onto Liberty Street to investigate.
“The first thing I saw,” said Martinez, “was a person on the ground. He was complaining. He was having trouble breathing. I told him not to worry, that I had called the ambulance. He was holding his head up, and suddenly his head went limp like he had fainted.”
Body-cam footage from Joseph Orr, an emergency medical technician, shows a police officer with his elbows locked stiff, keeping a fast-pumping action, a sort of rocking motion, quick compressions. He was trying to keep the blood circulating in Erick Crawford’s body. Additional emergency responders were arriving every moment.
“There was a police officer doing CPR,” testified Orr. “So we took over and gave him compressions.”
Under the clear blue sunny sky the blood on the sidewalk and grass was bright in places, and beginning to thicken, as blood does when exposed to oxygen. They cut off Crawford’s clothes to try to locate injuries quickly.
“We found that there were four holes in him. The bleeding had stopped already. There was no blood coming out of the bullet holes. His clothes were soaked in blood, and there was a puddle on the sidewalk. We applied chest seals, plastic that seals over the wound. That’s to keep the blood in, to prevent the patient from bleeding out. We also put a tourniquet over the right leg, to cut off the circulation and stop him from bleeding out. The first duty was to stabilize the victim, then prepare him for transport. He was taken straight to the Kingston Hospital emergency room.”
Fragments of fragments
The footage from Orr’s body camera describes a chaotic scene of frenetic activity, with emergency responders doing all they could to keep a stranger alive. Police and medical responders working in tandem, the white blood cells of society. The body cam picks up fragments of conversations.
“I need someone to relieve me.”
“Has anyone tried to listen to his heart?”
“I actually have a preserved bullet over here. It’s perfect.”
And then the video is finished, a moment of time kept alive of the passing of one man despite the dramatic efforts to resuscitate him.
“I didn’t want to believe it”
Lauren Ouzounian of the forensic investigation unit, NYS Police Troop F, arrived on the scene later and walked through the scene with other members of her unit, taking photographs, collecting evidence, placing placards with little numbers on them to indicate which items need to be secured. They look like little yellow table reservations.
Photographs presented as People’s Evidence in the courtroom show the bullet casings ejected after each gunshot, where they were found. Two PMC nine-millimeter casings. One Winchester nine-millimeter casing.
Other photographs show that the contents of Crawford’s red and blue Spiderman backpack have been scattered across the sidewalk by the emergency responders who went through his things. Hannaford bags have been turned out, spilling the food and snacks inside. Tostito chips. Chicken nuggets. Crest toothpaste. Cat food.
From the witness stand, Sandra Perry explained to the court that she had known Erick Crawford for about two and a half years.
“He would come over and hang out,” she said. “He would barbecue and play videogames and throw the football with my kids.”
On that afternoon she had been expecting Crawford to come over and cook.
“I was sitting in my house … when my phone rang. Told me that Erick got shot. I didn’t want to believe it.
“Injuries invariably fatal”
Forensic pathologist for Ulster County Charles Catanese, MD, explained to the court that the deceased had come to him from the morgue freezer, locked in a secure body bag. Therapeutic devices were still attached to his body, an IV catheter was still in his neck, a tourniquet from when the E.M.T.s who arrived on the scene had attempted to resuscitate Crawford and prevent him from going into shock still above the injured thigh.
He had been shot twice. One gunshot had been to his lower back. The bullet had entered and caused perforations to the spleen and the kidney, as well as to the small and large intestines.
The next bullet had passed through the femoral artery.
“Both perforations,” testified Catanese, “would cause blood loss very rapidly. Both injuries without a trauma surgeon nearby would invariably be fatal.”
A positive identification
Officers began to collect what leads were at hand. Taking the statements of bystanders. They had a description of the clothing. They knew the caliber of the weapon discharged. All they needed was a name.
Soon they would have the surveillance video from a corner store, from a RING-style camera off a private residence and from the two cameras mounted on the exterior of the Kingston Pop Museum. With a still photo derived from the video, investigators cased the neighborhood looking for a positive identification.
They found it soon enough.
The man in the black hoodie from the photo, people said, was Truvock Noble.
Police surrounded the Hyatt House Hotel on West Merritt Boulevard in Fishkill at about 10.30 p.m. on the night of March 22.
“We had developed a lead by pinging his phone,” explained state criminal investigator Steven Bouffard. “We set up a perimeter by placing individuals around the Hyatt House. Also unmarked police vehicles. We staked out the location. We didn’t sleep.
“At 6.30 in the morning I observed Truvock Noble walking across the parking lot between the hotel and a gas station. He was dressed in a pair of grey pants, black sweatshirt with a hoodie, red, white and black shoes. I approached him from the rear, driving my car. I stopped my car and got out behind him while other teams converged in front of him. He attempted to run. I was able to apprehend him. I grabbed him from a full nelson from behind, under his arms.”
Adam Hotaling, a Kingston police detective, had his firearm drawn, providing what is known as lethal cover until police could get Noble’s wrists in handcuffs.
“He was taken to my vehicle,” testified Hotaling, “and placed in the back seat and seat-belted in.”
On the ride back, they crossed over the Mid-Hudson Bridge at Poughkeepsie and drove up Route 9W. According to the sworn testimony of detective Hotaling, during the ride Truvock said: “You guys know someone stole my gun. You guys know that, right?”
Hotaling claims Noble made this statement out of the blue. He had not yet been charged with a crime, and no one had yet mentioned the murder
The case for the defense
William Pretsch has signed on as Noble’s defense attorney. An older man with white hair, Pretsch spent his cross-examinations probing for cracks in the credibility of the various witnesses, challenging their recollections of the color of the shoes the perpetrator wore and asking them to recall the order of their own actions a year ago. Did you go outside after the shots were fired, or before? Did you discuss the events with anyone else before the police arrived?
Every witness asked to identify Truvock Noble, sitting across the carpeted divide from the witness stand, was compelled to point at him. Witness after witness stretched out their arm, pointed their finger.
Truvock sat impassively through the hours of the court proceedings watching every question, every answer, every video, without comment or incident. Except for a small tattoo of an arrow-pierced heart over the cheekbone just below his left eye, in his suit and thick black-framed glasses he could have easily passed for a defense counsel rather than the man facing a prison sentence of 25-years-to-life if convicted.
Noble is charged with one count of murder in the second degree and two counts of criminal possession of a weapon.
As of this weekend, the murder weapon has yet to be entered into evidence. There’s every indication that police investigators haven’t yet recovered it.
Forensic investigator Ouzounian testified that the police had searched the surrounding bushes and yards and trash cans of the neighborhood the day of the murder but had come up empty-handed.
This may not matter. While under interrogation, Truvock Noble identified himself as the man in the still photograph, taken from the video outside the Kingston Pop Museum which had followed a man walking, then chasing another man down Liberty Street and out of the camera’s view. Four seconds later, three gunshots can be heard over the sounds of chirping birds and passing traffic.
The video of the interrogation has played for what has felt like its entirety on the large flat screen for the jury to observe.
Cops and suspects
The room used for the interview has shoddy, lightweight drop-ceiling tiles of the kind found in last-century office buildings. Vertical panels of corrugated metal are mounted on all four walls, starting at waist height, and tall wooden wainscoting rises to meet them.
The camera watches from a high vantage point, staring down at the familiar drama of cops interviewing a suspect taken into custody. The audio of circulated air from a ceiling vent becomes prominent when there is no talking, adding to the squalor and deprivation of the scene below.
Truvock Noble sits at the table. His left arm is at first not handcuffed to the wall. Before the video is over, it will be. Truvock will have his rights read to him. The police officer will let him know that he has been charged with murder.
He will put his head on the desk when the officer leaves the room, tapping at its surface with his fingers.
He will stand and move toward the door, rapping his knuckles against it, to have the door opened.
He will do these things over and over as the video is played again and again.
What comes next is the universally understood problem of a man locked in a room who has just been accused of murder. From this recorded moment forward, his life may be one of confinement. Twenty-five years may pass before he is free again to walk under the sun in any direction he chooses for as far as he chooses.
Defense attorney Pretsch’s strategy appears to hinge on the plausibility of Truvock Noble as unwitting victim of unlucky circumstances. That is, it is all a case of mistaken identity.
While the Ulster County district attorney’s office believes he is the killer, only Truvock Noble knows for sure.
And Erick Crawford did know.
The twelve members of the jury will balance the fate of this one man against the other, and carry out their responsibility for delivering impartial justice. The trial continues into its second week on Monday. April 4.
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