Passerby: Victim looked dead at shooting scene

YOUNGSTOWN — A passerby who helped Helen Moore’s two daughters out of the back seat of Moore’s overturned car moments after Moore had been shot testified that it was already too late to help Moore at that point.

“She already looked deceased when I looked in there,” Paul Brittain, a prosecution witness in the capital murder trial of Curtis Young said this morning.

Brittain said he was going downhill on North Center Street toward the Center Street Bridge on July 31, 2007, when he heard a loud pop, and noticed the car off the road, overturned on its passenger side in a wooded area.

He also said he saw a man standing in the middle of the street looking at the car, but not coming forward to try to assist its occupants.

“I heard children inside [the car] crying,” Brittain said. He then said he helped Moore’s daughters, Ashley, 11, and Maia, 5, out of the back seat.

After he got the girls out of the car, Brittain said he no longer saw the man standing in the street.

Ashley testified Monday that the car left the road after Young fired a single shot while standing outside his North Center Street residence.

Young, 26, is charged with aggravated murder with firearm and death penalty specifications in the shooting, which caused the death of Moore, 29, of Cassius Street, her nearly full-term fetus, and her 8-year-old son, Ceonei, who was her front seat passenger.

Firefighters extricated Helen and Ceonei Moore from the car’s front seat. The coroner said Helen Moore died at the scene of the shooting, and Ceonei was pronounced dead the following day in St. Elizabeth Health Center, both having died of bullet wounds.

Young’s trial, now in its second day of testimony, is before Judge Maureen A. Sweeney of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court.

For more on this story, see Wednesday’s Vindicator or vindy.com