DETROIT - One of six men charged in the 2001 robbery and slaying of an armored truck guard outside Dearborn FCU went on trial in federal court today.
Earl Johnson, 40, of Detroit and a former assembly line worker at Ford Motor Co., is accused of organizing the $204,000 robbery and recruiting other participants, but not of firing one of the shots that killed Norman "Anthony" Stephens, also of Detroit, early in the morning of Dec. 14, 2001.
Three other men charged in the case-Norman Duncan, Timothy O'Reilly, and Kevin Watson-are facing the possibility of the death penalty due to their roles in the crime. Shotgun blasts killed Stephens, a husband and father who was filling ATM machines at the credit union, now known as DFCU Financial, when a gang of armed robbers ambushed him and made off with the cash.
A key piece of evidence in the case will be a tape recording made secretly in 2004 in the exercise yard at Ryan Correctional Facility, where O'Reilly admitted to another inmate his own role in the robbery-killing and implicated Johnson and others.
