Two friends detailed for jurors Wednesday their final moments with 23-year-old Sabrina Galusha before they say her life was taken by a man they had never met.
While there are specific details of that fatal night on May 30, 2017, that friends Annika Tidd Civetti and Madison Campbell said play over and over in their minds, they were upfront with the court about the fact that their statements to police were inconsistent. Initially, they said, they lied to protect each other and themselves.
“We were all scared of getting in trouble for having drugs,” Civetti said during day two of a possible three-week murder trial.
Civetti, Campbell, Galusha and a fourth friend, Sam Chase, drove to Penacook Place Apartments on that spring night to sell Daswan Jette, who they knew only as “Dee,” a half-ounce of marijuana. But the friends allege that Jette attempted to steal the marijuana and prompted an altercation that ultimately led to Galusha’s death.
Jette, now 23, is standing trial in Merrimack County Superior Court this month on first- and second-degree murder charges. He is accused of pulling out a knife and of stabbing Galusha in the heart, causing her to quickly lose consciousness and to become unresponsive.
During her testimony Wednesday afternoon, Campbell said she, Civetti and Chase had discussed and agreed to omit any information about the drug deal that had brought them to Penacook Place that night. Instead, they would tell authorities that a man had randomly attacked them while they were at the apartment complex.
But they soon realized that both the police officers who responded to the call and the detectives who interviewed them separately later that night were not buying their stories. They said they were scared, emotional and didn’t know where to begin.
Civetti, who met Galusha while they were students at Concord High School, testified before jurors Wednesday that the plan was to sell Jette marijuana and leave, but that plan quickly fell apart. She recalled that Jette had gotten into the backseat of her Chevy Cruze and asked that the marijuana, which Galusha had brought, be weighed.
She said the next thing she knew, Jette was running from the car with Galusha and Chase close behind him.
Minutes passed and they hadn’t returned, so Campbell went after them, too. But Civetti said she never left her car because she had a bad feeling they might need to leave in a moment’s notice. What she did not know is that a fight had ensued in a vestibule in the nearby apartment building between Jette and her friends.
When her three friends reappeared, they were running and screaming for her to “get ready to go.”
Everyone made it to the car but Galusha didn’t get her door shut.
“That’s when he stabbed her,” Civetti said, referring to Jette. “Sam was trying to pull her in. … I didn’t see it but I heard her say, ‘He (expletive) stabbed me.’ ”
Without hesitation, Civetti knew she needed to get Galusha to Concord Hospital.
“She was making sounds like she was trying to breathe but she couldn’t, and that’s when we knew she wasn’t going to make it so we had to do something,” Civetti said.
She called 911 at 8:38 p.m. while driving toward downtown Concord on North State Street from Penacook Place. At the direction of a dispatcher, she said, she pulled over at Swenson Granite Works, and the group waited for emergency personnel to arrive.
In court Wednesday, Civetti heard herself on that 911 call for the first time. She told public defender Alexander Vitale that she doesn’t remember most of the telephone call more than two years later or the conversation with an officer on scene that followed.
She admitted from the witness stand that she had initially gone along with a made up story Chase had told a 911 dispatcher about a stranger who randomly approached them, demanded cash and then stabbed Galusha.
“You weren’t just worried about Sabrina,” Vitale said during his cross-examination of Civetti. “You were worried about yourself getting in trouble and that’s why you lied to police.”
“Yeah, I was scared,” she replied through tears.
“I was still processing all of this,” she later added. “I didn’t know what would happen.”
While Civetti did not tell police that she knew only of Galusha’s attacker as the man known as “Dee” on social media, Campbell said she did, and further tried to identify him by the clothing he was wearing that night. She said the portion of her story about Galusha getting stabbed in the car by “Dee” remained consistent throughout her statements, but it was only when she sat down with Concord police detectives at the station that she came clean about the drug deal.
“I could tell that they didn’t believe my story before so I started to tell the truth,” she said.
It was shortly thereafter that she learned from those same detectives that Galusha hadn’t survived the attack.
Campbell said she had met Galusha through Chase, her then-boyfriend, in spring 2017. The three of them had planned to put a down payment on an apartment in Chichester and live together.
“We were selling marijuana to try to get more money,” she testified.
She said when she got into the car with Civetti on the night of May 30, 2017, to pick up Galusha, she did not know the specifics of the drug deal that was about to occur.
While she remained composed for much of her testimony Wednesday, Campbell broke down when she recalled in great detail seeing Jette stab Galusha in the backseat of Civetti’s car. Everyone except Galusha had been securely seated inside the car, while Galusha had been unable to get her door shut, the friends testified.
“I saw Dee coming to the door and I thought he was punching her, but she was screaming that he had stabbed her,” Campbell said.
“I saw a lot of blood – the blood was pooling up in the seat – and Sam was holding a flannel against her chest,” she continued.
As Civetti began to speed away from the scene, Campbell said, she began crying and then vomited out the passenger’s side window of the car.
“What was all of this over?” Senior Assistant Attorney General Benjamin Agati asked Campbell at the conclusion of direct questioning Wednesday.
“A bag of weed,” she replied.
Campbell will retake the stand Thursday morning in Merrimack County Superior Court in Concord.
(Alyssa Dandrea can be reached at 369-3319 or at adandrea@cmonitor.com.)