A Brooklyn woman is facing life without parole for allegedly hiring a man to kill her husband, and trying to cash in on nearly $900,000 in insurance money, prosecutors said.
When poisoning her husband didn’t work, Alishia Noel-Murray turned to her boyfriend for help getting her spouse out of the picture, asking her lover to find someone to kill Omar Murray in Feb. 2013, officials said.
Noel-Murray, 28, had two problems, and thought she could solve them both at the same time, said Assistant District Attorney Emily Dean during opening statements Monday at Noel-Murray’s murder trial in Brooklyn Supreme Court.
She was having financial difficulties, and she wasn’t getting along with Murray, 37, with whom she shared a 10-month-old son.
Dean said Noel-Murray devised a plot to take care of both issues. Her persistence paid off, but only partly; her husband was dead, but she never got to cash in on the money.
Noel-Murray tried to poison her husband in Oct. 2012, but that attempt only ended in a trip to the hospital, Dean told jurors. She said Noel-Murray, who was having an affair, urged her boyfriend, Dameon Lovell, to recruit someone to gun her husband down.
Meanwhile, Noel-Murray took out three life insurance policies on her husband totaling $900,000 including one for $150,000 that was taken out just months before Murray’s death.
The first recruit, a friend of Lovell’s, tried to shoot Murray on Feb. 6, 2013, but missed, Dean said.
That’s when Lovell and Noel-Murray turned to Kirk Portious, another Lovell friend, and hired him for $3,500.
Murray, an iron worker, was shot to death Feb. 24, 2013 in the couple’s Brownsville home as he returned from a store run. Officials said he was shot with his own gun.
Lovell, 32, copped a plea bargain with prosecutors to testify against his former girlfriend and friend in exchange for 15 years to life in prison.
Noel-Murray and Portious, 28, are on trial together with separate juries.
"My client went there to beat someone up, not kill,” Portious’ attorney, Damien Brown, said in his opening statements. “You don't need a large man to shoot.”
After the shots were fired, Noel-Murray, who worked at the Visiting Nurse Service, allegedly called 911 to report an active shooter who didn’t allow emergency workers into the home as “critical minutes” passed to save Murray.
Brown and Noel-Murray's attorney Wynton Sharpe believe their clients were set up by Lovell who was jealous of Murray.
"The center of their case is Dameon Lovell...he's lied to everyone from the beginning. He wanted this new lifestyle and Omar was the one in the way," said Sharpe, adding, "the only crime my client did was being unfaithful...the prosecutors made a deal with the devil."
Two days after Murray’s death, Noel-Murray contacted National Benefit Life Insurance which held two separate policies for $530,000 and $200,000,
“She acted as if she didn’t care,” Dean said.
If convicted, Noel-Murray faces life in prison without the possibility of parole and Portious faces 25 years to life in prison.
