Downtown beggar testifies in drug scam murder trial

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A second local cocaine user and drug dealer took the witness stand Friday to testify for the indictment in the murder trial of Jitesh Bhogal, accused of killing Autumn Taggart at her home in west Windsor three years ago.

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Jake Thompson said he was “pretty drunk” the night he twice swindled a man seeking cocaine on the night of June 9, 2018. He said he was begging downtown when he offered help to the man behind the wheel of a vehicle to get some cocaine.

When questioned by Assistant Crown Attorney Ilana Mizel, Thompson, 46, said he had the man take him to a “trap house” (a place where people go to buy drugs) on University Avenue West but that he had no intention of getting him cocaine. . He found some flour in a kitchen cupboard in an abandoned apartment – “I made it look pretty presentable and realistic” – and sold it to the customer for $ 30.

Grabbing the cash, “I sped back to the trap house.”

To her surprise, she ran into the same man outside a few hours later. Thompson said he thought he got rid of the scammed customer, that he was now “quite upset and cursing me.” But then the man “said he wanted more.”

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It was then that Thompson saw his longtime girlfriend, Michelle Altiman. “Don’t worry, I’ll make it up to you,” he told the man before telling Altiman: “’We have a fish here’ … it means something good, a fool, someone we can get his money from. . “

Bhogal, now 31, is charged with sexually assaulting and killing Taggart, 31, in her apartment bedroom the night of June 9-10, 2018. The trial before Superior Court Judge Renee Pomerance and 14 Jurors concluded their third week on Friday and continued Monday with Thompson back on the stand.

Altiman was the previous witness to testify, and Friday morning was his third day on the stand. His term for the trap house was crack house, which was located next to Taggart’s apartment building. During questioning, defense attorney Peter Thorning pointed to his testimony in a previous preliminary investigation that “hundreds” of drug users frequented the crack house, two buildings east of McKay Avenue at University Avenue West. Thompson later said the couple were homeless at the time and “squatted” there.

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“Nobody lived there with kids or happy families, it’s a crack house,” Altiman previously said.

Thompson said he was drunk and had also used marijuana that night, as well as some of the cocaine he eventually obtained from the Altiman drug dealer. Altiman, questioned by the defense, admitted that she had been “beaten drunk” that night and that she had also used cocaine.

Altiman had previously testified that the client, whom he identified as Bhogal, had parked his vehicle in the parking lot of the Taggart apartment building in a location that the jury previously heard was under Taggart’s balcony. Thorning pointed to Altiman’s testimony in the preliminary investigation in which he said that Bhogal had parked closer to a fence next to a dumpster. Thompson recalled the vehicle “next to the dumpster.”

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With his girlfriend sitting in the front passenger seat and talking, Thompson said the three of them drove to a McDonald’s parking lot and bought cocaine from “their dealer” using the customer’s cash and then returned to the trap house. It was there, while the customer was testing the product in the vehicle, that the other two shot, with the cocaine, into an alley before hiding in some bushes along Cameron Avenue.

“We could hear him screaming,” Thompson said.

As for the two-time cheated client who met randomly that night downtown: “I never saw him again, until the courtroom.”

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