NORWICH– A 23-year-old man charged with murdering his friend at a Sherburne apartment complex appeared in Chenango County Court for the first time Thursday.
Joshua T. Story and his attorney Public Defender Alan E. Gordon appeared before Supreme Court Justice Kevin M. Dowd to make a request for bail. Story has been held without bail since his arrest Feb. 23. He has pleaded not guilty to the charge of killing his friend, Kallin P. Richards, 24, of New Berlin.
District Attorney Joseph McBride objected to the request, saying, “We ask this defendant be remanded without bail, your honor. He is not from our area; he’s from Tennessee. He has every reason to flee in order to avoid spending the rest of his life in prison.”
Gordon said his client did not have a serious criminal record, “minor offenses in his past, underage drinking I believe, something like that, something minimal.”
Dowd ordered Story’s bail set at $50,000. Story remains in jail this morning.
McBride said he would present the case to the grand jury next week, seeking murder charges.
On the night the alleged murder took place, Story and Richards were spending time together with some other friends playing cards at Story’s 33 Classic St. apartment in the Village of Sherburne after going to the local bar down the street.
The shooting took place just after 2:30 a.m. in the parking lot outside of Story’s apartment. Police responded to the scene after receiving calls about a gunshot from neighboring tenants. When arriving at the scene, officers found Richards dead in his white 2000 Ford Explorer as it rested against a tree in the parking area just outside the apartment complex. An autopsy conducted by Dr. James Terzian determined the cause of death to be a single gunshot wound to the torso, damaging the heart and liver.
Chenango County Sheriff Thomas Loughren said investigators located a witness at the scene who saw the shooting take place. “That witness identified the shooter as Joshua Story,” said Loughren.
Story was apprehended in his apartment shortly after the shooting. Lt. James E. Lloyd, who helped make the arrest, testified in Sherburne Village Court that they found Story asleep in his bedroom and discovered the 12-gauge shotgun used in the shooting a few yards away in the bedroom closet.
After a brief on-site interview with investigators at the scene, officers transported Story to the Sheriff’s Office in Norwich. Lt. Lloyd and Detective Sergeant Richard M. Cobb accompanied Story in the patrol car, where he allegedly confessed to killing Richards.
Both officers testified in court saying Story had an emotional breakdown in the vehicle while en route to the station and that he began asking God for forgiveness and saying he didn’t mean to kill Richards, only scare him.
Loughren said police did not yet have a motive for the murder, but indicated it may have originated over Story questioning whether Richards was sober enough to drive home. The autopsy showed that Richards’ was not intoxicated at the time of his death, with a blood alcohol content level of .04 percent. New York state law determines a person intoxicated if their BAC is .08 percent or higher.
“It was part of it. There were certainly other things. These two men obviously knew each other, and their confrontation was emotional as much as it was anything else and they lost their temper. It’s a thing we’ve seen before; it’s drinking and a gun being too accessible. If there was no gun available that night, then this call would have most likely been the routine weekend fight,” said Lloyd.
The victim and defendant were friends, according to the victim’s family. The two men also worked together at Baillie Lumber in Smyrna for the past six months.