Published: April 25, 2007 10:54 pm         

Carjacking victims talk about fearful experience

The voice on the 911 call sounded terrified and frantic.

“Please hurry,” Sonya Brogan told the emergency dispatcher moments after being robbed of her money and car at gunpoint at the Shady Spring Post Office late one February night last year.

“ ... He said he was going to kill me,” the call continued.

Jurors listened not only to that recording but to Brogan in person Wednesday in Raleigh County Circuit Court, where John Chadrick Yost is being tried before Judge John Hutchison on two counts of first-degree robbery, three counts of grand larceny, two counts of possession of a firearm by a person prohibited from having a firearm, two counts of fleeing police in a vehicle, one count of fleeing police on foot, third-degree arson and three counts of attempted first-degree murder.

In opening arguments, assistant prosecutor Tom Truman laid out a timeline of crimes, beginning in January 2006 when Yost allegedly used a gun to rob a young man of his car at outside a bar in Daniels. Then, a month later, according to Truman, Yost robbed a woman as she stopped to get her mail — this one at gunpoint, too.

That night, as police searched for Brogan’s assailant, they found themselves in a high-speed chase, exceeding 100 miles an hour on narrow country roads as they followed Yost in the vehicle he stole from Brogan, Truman said. Yost managed to evade police, stopped the vehicle in the middle of a road and fled on foot just a short distance until he stole another vehicle.

Around 3 a.m. on Feb. 4, 2006, State Police found Yost unloading items from the third stolen vehicle in front of his home on Colony Drive near Bragg. One of the troopers got out and aimed a weapon at Yost, who aimed the stolen vehicle at the officer and drove directly at him, Truman said. The trooper later testified he shot at Yost as he jumped out of the way.

Again, hours later, when two police officers attempted to stop Yost again, he tried to run over them, Truman said.

Police later found the third stolen vehicle on fire at the Bragg community center, and shortly afterward, they took Yost into custody at his mother’s house, after he finished his fried potato breakfast.

“How do we know all this happened?” Truman rhetorically asked the jury. “Because, when he’s taken into custody, he tells them. He gives them a voluntary statement. ... That’s our case — all the evidence coupled together with a confession. ... He did it and there can be no doubt he did it.”

Defense attorney Steve Mancini, however, in his opening statement, alluded to a lack of thorough forensic investigation and described a young, highly intoxicated man who felt threatened as he was chased by gun-wielding “cowboys” who scared him into fleeing.

Finally, an experienced officer got a confession from Yost, Mancini said, but only because that officer’s cool tactics stood in stark contrast to the actions of his fellow troopers.

“Capt. (S.F.) Van Meter, unlike these cowboys, doesn’t pull a gun,” Mancini said. “He’s not a cowboy. He’s a seasoned veteran. He walks up and says, ‘Chad, we need to talk.’”

And Yost did talk, but, Mancini said, police shouldn’t have stopped there.

“He was exhausted, he was high, he was scared, he had been shot at 17 times. They promised to help him, and he says, after all that, ‘yeah, I did the robbery at the post office.’ ... Then they ask him about one a couple weeks back at Club Extreme. ... They got their confession; they closed their folder. ... They didn’t even attempt to lift a single fingerprint. They didn’t even attempt a photo lineup. All they did was shoot at him and scare him and get a confession and close their book on the case, and here we are. ... You don’t shoot at somebody all night long ... and then bring him in and try to solve every other case that’s been going on. ... That’s bad police work.”

n n n

The state called several witnesses on this first day of testimony in the case. Among them:

n Raleigh County Sheriff’s Deputy Jimmy Canaday testified about his involvement with the investigation of the Club Extreme robbery on Jan. 7. He admitted under cross-examination that no fingerprints or DNA evidence was taken from the car after it was recovered because Yost was spotted in the car three days after it was stolen and eventually confessed to stealing it at gunpoint.

n Kenneth Phillips, the alleged victim of the first carjacking, described his attacker slightly differently than Yost appeared in court; most notably, he had originally described Yost at around 200 pounds; Yost is much smaller than that.

Wearing a winter hat and sporting a light brown goatee, Phillips said, the man he would later identify as Yost pointed a handgun at him after he started his vehicle to warm it up for a bar patron he promised a ride home. Phillips said he was not drinking.

“I thought I was going to die,” Phillips said when asked what he thought was going to happen when Yost allegedly pointed a gun at him and told him to “walk away.”

- Trooper 1st Class Scott Goodson said Yost struck his police vehicle while driving the vehicle stolen from Phillips. He found Yost in an otherwise empty parking lot and had stopped to ask him why he was parked there in the middle of the night. Yost hit the cruiser as he rushed away. Goodson said he did not pursue Yost that night, Jan. 10, because his vehicle was damaged and he feared the K-9 he carried with him had been hurt, too.

- Trooper C.H. Mitchell testified about recovering Phillips’ vehicle later on Jan. 10, and also about responding to the post office armed robbery call weeks later. He said the keys to Brogan’s stolen vehicle were found by another trooper on a dresser in Yost’s residence.

- Brogan detailed her most fearful night, talking about how a man — one she could never fully describe to police — took all the money she had and stole her car after she retrieved her mail from the post office on her way home from work, cleaning an office.

“I don’t remember if he said, ‘you’re gonna die,’ or, ‘do you wanna die,’ first,” Brogan told jurors.

“Did you think he would follow through on those threats?” Truman asked her.

“Yes, I did,” she said.

- Sheriff’s Cpl. Jim Bare said he found the stolen vehicle, and Yost inside it, at Winterplace the night Brogan reported the robbery. Bare described his high-speed pursuit as he narrated a video of the route they followed.

- Giovannie Meadows, a third alleged car theft victim, said she awakened when emergency services called her around 3:30 a.m. to ask if her vehicle had been stolen. The new car, a Nissan SUV, was valued at more than $35,000. Police testimony would later say that car was found on fire at the Bragg community center.

- Trooper Dave Williams said he approached Yost in front of his trailer, where he found him unloading items from the SUV he would soon learn had been stolen from Meadows. He said he got a good look at Yost before he jumped back into the car and “revved the motor.”

“At that time, he dropped it in drive and turned the wheel right at me,” Williams said. “I jumped out of the way of the vehicle, and I fired a shot.”

Williams also said he and other troopers followed Yost, lost him, but again met up with him around 5 a.m. in the Bennett Mountain area. That time, Yost stopped, and Williams and another trooper got out of the vehicle, guns drawn because of Yost’s prior behavior and because they had been told Yost was a suspect in the earlier armed robbery at the post office.

“He shoved the gas to the floor again, dropped it in drive and drove directly at me,” he said, adding that he and his partner both fired at Yost as they jumped out of the way. He also said Yost hit their police truck, shattering a window and breaking a door.

“He definitely went out of his way in a effort to run over me,” Williams said.

Testimony continues today.

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