OAKLAND — An Alameda County jury took less than a full day of deliberation to acquit the son of a retired Union City police chief of murder and attempted robbery charges.
Tyrone McAllister, 24, had been charged with murdering 32-year-old Janath Liyanage, of Garden Grove, in an August 2019 shooting. The prosecution witnesses included McAllister’s own co-defendant, Dennis Evans, who implicated McAllister in the killing with a detailed story.
But Evans’ word — coupled with cellphone evidence — apparently wasn’t convincing enough. On Wednesday, jurors announced they’d reached not guilty verdicts on the murder and attempted murder charges.
The jury did convict McAllister of a robbery that happened hours before the fatal shooting of Liyanage, which he admitted to from the witness stand. During closing arguments, McAllister’s lawyer told the jury that they wouldn’t defend against that charge and to “go ahead and convict” him of it. Because of that conviction, McAllister faces a likely prison sentence, to be determined at a later date by Judge Scott Patton.
Tyrone McAllister is the son of former Union City police Chief Darryl McAllister, who retired in 2018.
Evans was set to join Tyrone McAllister at trial, but last December he made an about-face, taking a plea deal that allows him to get a five-year probation term in exchange for testifying in McAllister’s trial. But the deal makes Evans eligible for a 10-year prison sentence if his testimony isn’t deemed truthful.
It is up to Patton to determine how truthful Evans was on the witness stand, and either confirm his five-year probation deal or sentence him to prison.
McAllister testified in his own defense, refuting Evans’ accusation that he was the man who shot and killed Liyanage during a struggle on the 600 block of 20th Street in Oakland, at 11:13 p.m. on Aug. 20, 2019. Video of the killing shows a man approach Liyanage and a brief struggle, then a loud bang is heard and one of the men is seen running to a waiting vehicle.
Evans testified during trial that he and McAllister spent the day plotting robberies around Oakland, including the gunpoint holdup of a man earlier in the day where they ended up with two bags of groceries. He claimed McAllister wanted to commit one last robbery that night, and after shooting Liyanage returned to the vehicle and told Evans, “I did something stupid.”
McAllister’s lawyer, Annie Beles, told jurors during her closing argument on Tuesday that the two parted ways after the grocery bags robbery, well before the shooting. She brushed off Evans as someone who “was going to say what he thought the prosecution wanted him to say” and argued the prosecution had nothing to bolster Evans’ story.
“(Evans) just says, ‘honestly,’ just to say it,” Beles said, referencing a police interview shortly after Evans’ arrest, where he told detectives he “honestly” didn’t have anything to do with the robberies and homicide he now admits to.
Deputy District Attorney Monica Brock, the prosecuting attorney, said that the surveillance footage of a “skinny” man running back to Evans’ vehicle matches a general description of McAllister, who she said testified he has “always had trouble keeping on weight.”
But the real clincher, argued Brock, was cellphone data placing McAllister’s iPhone near the crime scene.
Afterward, McAllister got rid of the phone in favor of a much older model, and complained to friends he was “embarrassed” by the downgrade, Brock said.
“He was desperate to get rid of that phone,” because he knew it could link him to the killing, Brock argued, later adding there was evidence McAllister planned to flee to Ohio after the shooting. She said McAllister was “frustrated” they only made off with groceries in the earlier robbery, and that he hoped to rob a Rolex watch from someone and use the proceeds to fund a trip to Las Vegas.
But Beles countered that the GPS evidence showed only that McAllister’s phone had been left in Evans’ car, not that McAllister himself was there. She said an expert on cellphone data who testified for the prosecution was “forced to” admit that McAllister’s phone had not been used from four hours before the homicide until around 8 a.m. the following morning, an indication that McAllister had been separated from the phone.
That time lapse made no sense, argued Beles, because McAllister — a teenaged adult at the time of the homicide –normally texted and called friends constantly.
“He didn’t do it. It hasn’t been proven to you,” Beles told jurors on Tuesday.
