Jalen Bellaflores had intended to go to the movies with his girlfriend the night of Dec. 2, 2019, but for some reason, the girl’s parents put the kibosh on those plans.
He still wanted to go so he Snapchatted Anu-Malik Johnson, and they decided to head out to see “Queen & Slim,” a 2019 movie about a young couple that becomes embroiled in violence, at the Regal Cinema in West Manchester Township. Bellaflores knew Johnson from Northeastern York High School, where Johnson had been a star running back on the football team.
The trial for Anu-Malik Johnson, accused of killing Andre White Jr. in the Regal Cinema in December 2019, entered its third day with testimony from a friend of Johnson’s from the grave.
Bellaflores wouldn’t see the movie that night.
About 10 minutes after they took their seats – Johnson taking the seat on the aisle of Row F – Andre White Jr. and his date entered the theater and climbed the stairs to the back row, Row G.
White stopped briefly by Johnson and they exchanged greetings – saying “whassup?” simultaneously. The two young men knew one another and had a beef going back to when Johnson suspected White of shooting at his car on West Princess Street in York.
Bellaflores, who was looking at his phone, heard the exchange and detected something in the tone.
“Things didn’t feel right,” Bellaflores said in testimony from a preliminary hearing. “It didn’t sound right to me.”
He made up a story about his mom calling him and left the theater. As he walked to the exit, he didn’t look back. A moment later, as he was reaching the end of the hallway outside the theater, he heard gunfire. He didn’t know how many shots.
A few seconds later, as he approached the theater’s exit, Johnson ran toward him. He told Bellaflores, “Go, bro, go!”
Inside the theater, 22-year-old White lay in Row G of Theater 6, fatally wounded, shot five times.
And that was how Bellaflores wound up testifying for the prosecution in 25-year-old Johnson’s first-degree-murder trial in White’s shooting death at the theater. Bellaflores did not testify in person. He testified from the grave. He died on July 8 this year at his Conewago Township home at the age of 23.
Previously: Woman testifies about movie date that ended in shooting during Regal Cinema murder trial
Previously: His son faces death penalty in Regal theater murder. Why this York father blames himself
The prosecution presented his testimony from Johnson’s February 2020 preliminary hearing, a member of the district attorney’s office reading his answers from a transcript as attorneys read the questions. The jury was told only that Bellaflores was unable to appear due to a “medical event,” not that he was dead, to avoid speculation that he had been killed in retaliation for cooperating with authorities. He wasn’t, defense attorneys said. The cause of his death was not specified in his obituary. At the time of his death, Bellaflores was working as a pharmacy tech at Rite Aid and studying to be a pediatric nurse at HACC.
Bellaflores had testified that he didn’t know White. He testified that Johnson didn’t say he was going to kill White before the shooting. “He didn’t say he was going to kill anybody there,” he said. He didn’t see a gun in Johnson’s possession that night.
All he knew was that he had a bad feeling after Johnson and White exchanged greetings and had to get out of there. “I’m not a confrontational person,” he said. “I don’t like that stuff, so I left.”
As they left the theater, Bellaflores said, “I wasn’t asking no questions. I didn’t know what was going on. … I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to go home.”
After they climbed into Bellaflores’ red Volkswagen Jetta and left the theater parking lot, Johnson put an address into Bellaflores’ phone. He changed his mind and put in another address and asked Bellaflores to drive him there. It was an address in Harrisburg.
“That was when he told me he shot Andre,” Bellaflores said.
Bellaflores testified that Johnson made some phone calls, telling people he had shot White. Bellaflores paid little attention, focusing on the road. “I was scared,” he said.
He dropped Johnson off at the address in Harrisburg and then went home.
He did not call the police.
Anu-Malik Johnson was a star running back at Northeastern High School, rushing for more than 1,000 yards his senior year. He’s on trial for the 2019 murder of Andre White Jr. in the Regal Cinema in West Manchester.
The evidence
In the hours after the shooting, West Manchester Township Sgt. Lance Krout and members of the York County Forensic Team scoured the theater for evidence. They found nine .40-caliber shell casings and several bullets embedded in the wall and behind the seat formerly occupied by White.
They photographed a blood stain on the floor in front of White’s seat. Before they began their work, Krout testified, White had been taken to York Hospital, where he died from multiple gunshot wounds.
They did not find any bullets in the wall behind where Johnson had been standing, he testified, a key fact since Johnson is claiming self-defense in the shooting.
Krout testified that the team did not test the seats around White’s seat for gunshot residue. He said he asked the pathologist to conduct such a test on White’s hands, but that test, for some reason, was not done.
Krout also testified that the forensic team returned to the theater four days after the shooting, and after White’s autopsy, to search for more evidence. He said they had asked the theater operator to close Theater 6 and keep it locked. On that return trip, they found more bullet fragments under the seats in the last row, after removing the seats.
Even later, he testified, one of his fellow officers responded to a call from the theater staff. They had found another bullet fragment near the entrance to Theater 6, he said.
All of the bullet casings were .40 caliber, a firearms expert testified. Of the bullets that could be identified, all but one were also .40 caliber. One 9mm bullet was recovered, the expert testified. No spent 9mm cartridge was found, explained by the expert that it could have been jammed in a semi-automatic pistol, among other explanations.
One .40-caliber round was recovered from White’s body, entering in the upper thigh and lodging in his pelvis, forensic pathologist Edward Mazuchowski. White was wounded five times, the pathologist testified. Two of them struck him the left upper chest, piercing both lungs and his heart before exiting the right side of his chest. Another entered his left side and traveled upward and through his neck, severing both jugular veins and his trachea.
The pathologist described the chest wounds as “rapidly fatal,” causing death within “seconds or minutes.”
This article originally appeared on York Daily Record: Witness testifies against accused Regal Cinema shooter from the grave