Testimony Tells of a Casual Murder

On a fine summer night in June 2000, two Rhode Island college students were out on a date.

Hours later, Amy Shute and Jason Burgeson were shot dead at a partially constructed golf course, victims of a crime whose icy randomness jarred this hard-edged city. Providence shuddered anew this week as chilling details of the killings unfolded at the trial of the only one of the five men who did not plead guilty to a plot to rob, carjack and murder anyone they happened to find that night.

In a trial that offered an inadvertent study of urban violence, Kenneth L. Day, 23, spent the week gazing impassively as his former best friend, Gregory J. Floyd, 21, answered questions from lawyers. Floyd and three others pleaded guilty after federal prosecutors opted not to seek the death penalty.

“They told me I didn’t have to do it,” Floyd said the two college students urged him as he held a gun over their heads. “They were crying.”

Floyd pulled the trigger anyway.

“There was no feeling,” he said in a voice so cold that some spectators left the courtroom to compose themselves. “It was just numbness.”

The five carjackers made off with Burgeson’s white Ford Explorer after the shootings. They also pocketed all the money the two victims had on them, $18.

But Day said from the start that he would not “go down” for the slayings of Shute and Burgeson, a sheriff who overheard Day talking with another defendant, testified in federal court Friday.

“You’re the one who did it,” Sheriff Patrick Keeley said Day told Floyd.

According to Keeley, Floyd rejoined: “You guys hooked me up to this.”

The crime jolted Providence at first because both victims were white. Race, class and ethnic tensions run high here. And when at least one of the suspects turned out to be African American, the city steeled itself for the possibility of a racially motivated murder.

Instead the crime proved to be one of random violence. Floyd, the first of the carjackers to speak publicly, captivated the courtroom last week as he described the decision to go looking for someone to rob and kill.

Though several of them worked occasionally, most of the five young men spent their days hanging out at a park in the center of Providence.

“All day long, every day they were there, from 10 o’clock in the morning until sometimes 2 o’clock in the morning,” the owner of a pizza parlor near the park testified Friday.

They launched their scheme by trying to seek out someone who had tried to buy drugs from one of the five men. When they couldn’t locate that potential victim, they scoured the bus station. Again, they had no luck.

Floyd told the court that he and his friends were looking for someone prosperous, someone with the right clothes, hairstyle and a confident stride.

They found a man talking on a cell phone and started to close in. But the man’s friends showed up. Then they tried two women at an automated teller machine. The women, he said, were obviously inebriated, easy marks. That plan fizzled when a security guard spotted the five men and told them to disperse.

Then they saw Shute and Burgeson, chatting on the steps of a downtown shopping arcade.

“Ooh, ooh, look,” Floyd said Day remarked.

The five men confronted Burgeson, 20, and Shute, 21, and flashed their gun. They forced the pair into the Explorer, then drove aimlessly--apparently unsure what their next step should be.

And then, asked Joseph L. DeCaporale Jr., the lawyer for Day, “Mr. Day urged you to kill Amy and Jason?”

“He didn’t object to it,” Floyd replied. “He suggested it.”

Prosecutor Gerard B. Sullivan inquired, “And when did you form the intent” to kill Burgeson and Shute?

Floyd answered, “I can’t really say that I did. It just happened.”

Floyd has been sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.

Three others involved--Harry Burdick, 23, Samuel Sanchez, 21, and Raymond Anderson, 20--have pleaded guilty and are awaiting sentencing.

In court Friday, Burdick’s girlfriend said she tried to persuade him to go home with her that night instead of heading out with his friends.

“I overheard Greg [Floyd] say he wanted to ‘jack’ someone for his money,” said Brandi Landry. “I told Harry I didn’t want him to go with Greg. I wanted him to come home with me because I knew something was going to happen.”

Landry testified that Floyd, for one, was “a very friendly person. And he loved to steal cars.”