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Cops hunt teen's
killer
Cold-blooded slaying spurs search
for pair
By BILL BLAIR
THE TRIBUNE-DEMOCRAT
Johnstown police scoured neighborhoods
Wednesday for two masked gunmen who shot and killed a teen-ager in
cold blood - a robbery-turned-murder that sent chills through the
city.
Aaron Coyle, 18, was shot
after refusing to hand over any money during a shakedown late
Tuesday in a snowy Moxham parking lot, city police Capt. Craig Foust
said.
Coyle, mortally wounded,
staggered about 40 feet before collapsing on a sidewalk near the
intersection of Coleman Avenue and Village Street, the captain
said.
The killers, dark hoods
pulled over their heads and white bandanas covering their faces,
fled.
Foust did not say whether
officers had specific suspects and appealed to anyone with
information to contact police. The gunmen were described only as
black males in their late teens.
“We are definitely ruling the death of Aaron
Coyle as a homicide,” Cambria County Coroner Dennis Kwiatkowski said
in a press conference at Central Park Complex in downtown
Johnstown.
Coyle was pronounced
dead at 10:35 p.m. Tuesday in the emergency room at Memorial Medical
Center. He died of a single gunshot wound to the chest, Kwiatkowski
said.
Coyle lived in Moxham and
was a senior at Greater Johnstown High School.
Foust said the 18-year-old was in a parking lot
near the intersection of Coleman and Village and talking with
friends just before 10 p.m. when he was fatally wounded at
point-blank range.
At this
point, Foust said, police do not know whether the incident might be
related to a string of other recent armed robberies in the city
involving pizza shops.
“It’s
hard to say,” Foust said prior to the press
conference. |
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ROGER KERKES/THE
TRIBUNE-DEMOCRAT Aaron Coyle
(top) was shot to death during a robbery in a parking lot near at
pool hall in Moxham. |
He said investigators will not
know whether there is any connection until evidence does or does not
show such a link.
“Obviously,
we’re checking that out,” he said.
Foust said Coyle was talking to five young women
and men seated in a car at the lot when they were approached by the
masked men. Foust said the suspects jumped over a fence and ran
across the parking lot before approaching the car.
The pair then demanded money from those in the
auto.
After one of the people
inside cooperated and turned over his money, one of the two killers
made a similar demand of Coyle, Foust said.
“As far as we can determine, the victim in the
shooting did not give up any money,” Foust said.
Moments later, Foust said, one of the two
suspects hit Coyle with a gun and Coyle crumpled to the
ground.
The same man then
stood over the high-schooler and shot him.
From the way the bullet traveled through the
victim’s body, authorities think Coyle was bent over when he was
shot.
The coroner said it was
estimated that the gun was fired at a distance of 2 feet or
less.
Kwiatkowski said the
bullet struck Coyle in the upper chest just below the neck. The
bullet traveled downward through his body before exiting the right
side of the back, he said.
On
the frozen sidewalk, Coyle was attended to by two passers-by until
medical help arrived, Foust said.
After the shooting, the suspects left the
parking lot in the same fashion they had entered it, Foust
said.
Asked whether Coyle
did anything to prompt him being shot, Foust said, “There’s nothing
to indicate that Aaron was anything more than a (innocent)
victim.’’ |
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