Portland police have always believed that a gun that was reported stolen on March 16, 2016, was the same one used in a deadly shooting at 88 Gilman St. the night before.

At some point, police began to suspect the gun wasn’t actually stolen and that it was the gun owner’s boyfriend, Aristotle Stilley, who fired several rounds at an apartment door, killing 36-year-old David Anderson and injuring 21-year-old Abdirahman Abdullahi.

In an effort to link Stilley to the crime, prosecutors spent the third day of his murder trial introducing jurors to several police officers, lab technicians and analysts who reviewed both the crime scene and the alleged murder weapon.

Police said Wednesday they found Naja Lake’s .40 caliber Hi-Point gun on Oxford Street nearly two months after the shooting. It was in a small purple Nike bag with an empty magazine, under a dumpster less than two miles from Gilman Street.

The serial number was scratched off – a telltale sign of a stolen firearm, officers said – but crime lab scientists were able to recover the number and match the gun back to one Lake purchased in February 2016.

INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE

A crime lab scientist who specializes in firearms said there were several rifling marks on the recovered bullets that suggested they could have been fired from a Hi-Point. But that finding was not conclusive – which Stilley’s defense attorneys pointed to several times.

“It could have been fired from this gun,” lab scientist Kimberly James told the court on Wednesday.

Christine Waterhouse, a forensic DNA analyst, said none of the DNA found on the gun matched swabs taken from Lake and Stilley, and in fact the results excluded Stilley as a potential contributor.

But that doesn’t mean Stilley couldn’t have handled the gun. It’s possible that the swab didn’t pick up all the DNA profiles on the gun, or that whoever had used the gun had taken precautions not to touch it by wearing gloves.

Stilley’s attorneys, Tina Nadeau and Stephen Shea, stressed that Waterhouse had excluded Stilley and those findings were held up in two reviews. They asked several times why police didn’t ask Waterhouse to test more materials from the apartment for DNA samples, even though she said it wouldn’t have yielded reliable results.

Nadeau and Shea also cast doubt on a height analysis by FBI employee Christopher Iber, who analyzes video evidence of suspects to help identify them.

Iber reviewed video of the suspect approaching the apartment at 88 Gilman St. before firing his weapon. Using a single frame from that video, and then visiting the location in person, he said he was able to determine that the suspect was about 6 feet, 3 inches tall. But that doesn’t account for the thickness of the suspect’s shoes and clothing, or how tall he would be with different posture.

Stilley was measured by an evidence technician and is about 6 feet tall. Neither Iber nor prosecutors discussed his height much on Wednesday.

ELUSIVE IN VIDEO

The state has little information from eyewitnesses and surveillance footage to help identify Stilley.

Videos played in court this week show only a man, dressed in a black hooded sweatshirt, with a red face-covering.

Abdullahi testified Monday that the suspect had his back turned when he knocked on the apartment door. Neither Abdullahi nor Anthony Osborne, who was also in the apartment that night, recognized the shooter.

Police had been surveilling apartment 305 at 88 Gilman St. about a week before the shooting for alleged drug trafficking. The property manager had recently contacted police about a large number of people coming and going from the apartment, many only staying for short periods of time.

Investigators testified earlier this week that they reviewed weeks worth of surveillance videos of visitors going in and out of the apartment, looking for anyone who resembled the shooter, but never found any matches.

Stilley’s attorneys have said he had no ties to the place or the people there. Prosecutors said they were led to Stilley by statements from Lake, who told a grand jury in 2018 during a different case that Stilley didn’t deny using her gun when she asked if it was used in the shooting. Lake recanted these statements on Tuesday.

Prosecutors have yet to show the jury cell phone records which they hinted, in opening statements Monday, are expected to show Stilley and Lake contacting a man with ties to the Gilman Street apartment hours before the shooting.

The trial will be postponed Thursday because of the storm. Attorneys are scheduled to be back in court Friday.

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