Frantic calls flowed into Baltimore’s 911 operators in the late morning of Jan. 4, 2023, drawing authorities’ attention to the Popeyes in the Edmondson Village Shopping Center.

“Somebody just walked up on a group of kids and shot a whole group of kids,” one woman told the operator, according to a recording of the call played in Baltimore Circuit Court on Thursday.

The woman described the shooters as two males dressed in black.

“Oh, my god,” she said. “The one that’s laying on the ground is not breathing. The one that’s shot in the neck, he has no pulse. Someone is giving him CPR now.”

She was likely referring to 16-year-old Deanta Dorsey, who was gunned down that day in West Baltimore along with four other teens. Dorsey was unresponsive when police arrived. A prosecutor said Tuesday that he had been shot 16 times. Medics took Dorsey to the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center, but he died at the hospital.

The woman’s 911 call was one of three that prosecutors played Tuesday as they began putting on their case against 18-year-old Daaon Spears, one of two people charged with killing Dorsey and shooting four others. The shootings rattled students and faculty at Edmondson-Westside High School, which is right across the street and where the five victims went to school.

“I got one of my students shot in the leg,” a man told a 911 operator. “Another of my students is shot in the foot.”

Assistant State’s Attorney Rita Wisthoff-Ito said in opening statements that the prosecution’s case relies largely on circumstantial evidence, including “a lot of video footage.”

Calling it a “broad daylight” shooting, Wisthoff-Ito argued that there was enough evidence for the jury, selected Tuesday, to find Spears guilty of all charges at the end of the trial.

Spears and Bryan Johnson, who is due in court in December, are both charged with first-degree murder and four counts each of conspiracy to commit murder and attempted first-degree murder. They also face a range of firearms offenses. Both were 16 at the time of the shooting but are being tried as adults.

“What is your intent when you’re firing at someone?” said Wisthoff-Ito, describing the shooting as premeditated. “Luckily for this defendant, we’re not here for five homicides.”

Defense attorney Brandon T. Taylor countered that there were no ballistics, DNA or fingerprints linking Spears to the crime.

“The state is pointing their finger in the wrong direction. … He was not involved in this tragic incident,” Taylor said. “Those students deserve justice, but convicting an innocent kid is not justice.”

Police officers soon summoned homicide detectives to the shopping center around noon that January day last year after finding the chaotic scene with five people suffering from gunshot wounds on the ground.

Officer Daniel Asante was heating his lunch in the Baltimore Police Department’s Southwest District Station when the call for a shooting buzzed over the radio. He ran out the door and rushed to the scene, lights and sirens blazing, according to footage captured on his body-worn camera played in court Tuesday.

“Go, go, go!” Asante ordered cars that were trying to leave the shopping center.

“I need everybody to go inside. If you’re not part of it, I need you to clear out,” he told bystanders. “You need to be out of the crime scene.”

One of the teens who had been shot cried out as an officer tended to him, the footage showed.

“You got shot?” Asante asked another teen who responded that he had.

After doctors declared Dorsey dead, he was taken to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore for an autopsy. Dr. Edernst Noncent documented Dorsey’s extensive injuries as he examined his body.

Thirteen bullets had entered and exited Dorsey, while three more wounds were associated with bullets the doctor recovered from his body, Noncent testified. One shot hit Dorsey in the head, piercing his skull and damaging his brain, where the bullet lodged.

Noncent declared Dorsey’s death a homicide by multiple gunshot wounds.

According to charging documents, one of the other victims was shot in the right thigh. Another suffered gunshot wounds to his back and leg. One was shot in the ankle. A bullet grazed a fourth in the back. All were taken to either Shock Trauma or Sinai Hospital.

While they received treatments, police processed the crime scene, with crime lab technicians picking up 9 mm cartridge casings and detectives canvassing for video.

Detectives wrote in charging papers that footage they recovered showed Spears entering his residence on Edmondson Avenue before the shooting, “meeting up with the second shooter,” and walking to the scene, where “both used handguns to shoot” Dorsey and the other victims, according to charging documents. Spears allegedly fled on foot on Colborne Road.

Taylor said in court Thursday that the footage didn’t show his client.

“He had no motive to shoot any other student,” Taylor said. “He had no issue with any other student.”

Witnesses “viewed video and/or stills of the video and identified one of the shooters as Daaon Spears,” detectives wrote.

Investigators armed with a warrant searched Spears’ home more than a month after the shooting and found “clothing matching the clothing seen on video” from his room along with a Taurus Millennium PT-111 Pro 9 mm handgun loaded with one round in the chamber and 28 in the attached magazine, according to charging documents.

Taylor said his client’s DNA was not identified on the gun.

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