PnB Rock Murder Trial Verdict: Jury Finds Two Men Guilty on All Counts

The man charged with sending his armed 17-year-old son into a Roscoe’s Chicken & Waffles restaurant to rob celebrated rapper PnB Rock was found guilty of felony murder, two counts of robbery and one count of conspiracy at a trial in Compton, Calif., on Wednesday.

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The jury took less than four hours to decide Freddie Trone, 42, orchestrated the brazen daylight robbery that ultimately claimed the musician’s life. During nine days of testimony, jurors heard that the alleged teen shooter, charged separately in juvenile court , stalked into the restaurant wearing a ski mask and a “Fruity Pebbles” T-shirt and then opened fire on the artist and his fiancée Stephanie Sibounheuang only seconds after shouting, “If you don’t give me the jewelry, I’m going to blow her head off.” Sibounheuang had recounted the terrifying attack on the witness stand, saying Allen “threw” her under the table when the gunfire erupted . A medical examiner testified PnB Rock, born Rakim Allen, was shot once in the chest and twice in the back.

Trone’s co-defendant Tremont Jones, 46, also was found guilty Wednesday of two counts of robbery and one count of conspiracy. Prosecutors alleged Jones was the one who tipped Trone off to the rapper walking into the Roscoe’s with both Sibounheuang and a half-million dollars’ worth of jewelry on September 12, 2022. Sentencing for both men is set for August 27.

“I’m elated,” Allen’s mom Deannea Allen told Rolling Stone moments after the verdict was read. “I wanted to jump up and scream, ‘Hallelujah.’ I’m so happy it was quick. We got justice for Rakim. I feel better knowing they’ll be in jail for a long time.”

Reached by phone, Sibounheuang said Wednesday she was “thankful” for the verdict. “I’m grateful we could get justice so soon,” she tells Rolling Stone . “I don’t have to be concerned about who did it. I don’t have to worry about where it came from. I know exactly where it came from, and I know that justice is served.”

The jury foreperson, Edwin Lovo, tells Rolling Stone that the panel of four women and eight men focused their attention on the surveillance video of the Buick Enclave that delivered the alleged teen shooter to the scene and then picked him up minutes later. Trone testified in his own defense during the trial that he was not in the car at that point and that he later found his son in a nearby parking lot with three other young men. Lovo said the jury “zoomed in” on video of the vehicle fleeing the shooting and identified Trone in the driver’s seat based on his clothing.

“We could clearly see it was him,” Lovo said. “There was somebody with a white shirt and frayed pants in the car. It was the dad driving the car. He was an accomplice. So that led us to follow the verdict form and check off all those points.” Lovo said it was an overhead camera on a nearby church that captured the bird’s eye view into the vehicle from the passenger side. He said no one else was in the front, so jurors could see the driver’s thigh and make out the distinctive clothing that Trone was spotted wearing that day.

In closing arguments this week, Deputy District Attorney Timothy Richardson said that Trone knew his son was “dangerous” when he plotted the robbery that quickly turned deadly. Trone’s defense lawyer, Winston McKesson, had argued that the dad was at the Roscoe’s minutes before the shooting not to plan the robbery, as prosecutors alleged, but to “drum up” business for his beauty supply shop and buy marijuana from Jones. He said Trone’s son swiped the keys to the Enclave minutes later back at the beauty supply shop and then traveled to the Roscoe’s for the deadly shooting without the dad’s knowledge.

That short six-minute timespan between when Trone left the Roscoe’s parking lot at 1:14 p.m. that day and when his Enclave was seen on surveillance returning to the scene was a major focus of the trial. Richardson argued that during that six minutes, Trone armed his son with the semi-automatic gun, the ski mask, and the robbery plot.

McKesson had urged jurors to scrutinize the surveillance video showing the shooter arriving in the car outside the Roscoe’s in South Los Angeles. He said the teen was seen exiting the Enclave from the seat behind the driver, entering and exiting the Roscoe’s, and running back to the closest backseat door before hesitating and circling around to the backseat on the driver’s side. He said that proved there were “more people in the car” and supported Trone’s testimony he wasn’t there. The jury rejected that argument.

In his final rebuttal after McKesson spoke, Richardson told jurors that the six critical minutes simply weren’t enough time for Trone’s version of events. He argued that the surveillance video of the Enclave from the neighborhood “shows you where the vehicle went,” and a round trip to Trone’s shop several more blocks away “was impossible.”

“In six minutes, the defense want you to believe that [the teen shooter] rounded up his boys, got a strap, hopped in his dad’s car, and drove back to the Roscoe’s,” Richardson argued. “Coincidence? No. Coordinated acts? Yes.”

Richardson delivered the bulk of his closing argument on Monday, going over the many surveillance videos that pieced together Allen’s final hours and the aftermath that included Trone’s movements before he admittedly burned the Enclave a few blocks from his wife’s residence after the shooting. On Tuesday, Trone’s lawyer argued that with “all these videos” collected by investigators, the only time Trone was seen actually getting into the vehicle was when he left the Roscoe’s parking lot after speaking with Jones for the three minutes leading up to 1:14 p.m. The lawyer said the “covered” item that Jones handed Trone during the meeting was the marijuana, not a gun supplied for an alleged conspiracy to commit robbery.

PnB Rock's Murder Trial Hinges on 'Six Minutes,' Jury Told in Closing Arguments

“He told you why he buys the weed. He said it’s because smoking marijuana does a better job to balance his son’s chemical imbalance and has a better total effect than Adderall,” McKesson said, referring to the medication that Trone said his son had been prescribed.

The lawyer also used his final address to jurors to fault investigators for not collecting surveillance video from the area around Trone’s beauty shop, about a half-mile away. He argued such video would have backed up Trone’s claim that his car was stolen by his son and that an unidentified person with a burgundy SUV picked him up so he could search for his son. The defense lawyer said prosecutors also failed to provide evidence of any communication between Trone and Jones before they met up in the Roscoe’s parking lot about a half hour after Allen first appeared and fist-bumped Jones as he entered the Roscoe’s with Sibounheuang.

“There’s no evidence to show my client was paged to get there, no phone calls, no text messages. They want you to believe he just intuited that his services on a robbery homicide would be required,” McKesson argued. He claimed investigators had “their mind made up” and “ignored” anything that could prove his client’s innocence. “There’s no evidence that my client planned anything. You have no evidence that he intended anything,” he said. “This young [shooter] acted independently of his dad. There is no evidence that he controlled that boy.”

Richardson rebutted that he wasn’t required to show that there was extensive pre-planning or even that Jones met with the teen shooter before the homicide. He called the robbery conspiracy a “crime of opportunity.” He also called it “astonishing” that Trone admitted he was buying weed for his teen son to replace prescription drugs.

Richardson urged the jurors to question why Trone never identified the person who allegedly picked him up in the burgundy SUV. “That is the person that can account for those six minutes of Mr. Freddie Trone’s life … He just needs these six minutes of explanation not captured on a camera. Mr. Freddie Trone didn’t want to give you the name of that person — the sole person to provide an alibi,” Richardson argued. He said the reason was because the driver didn’t “exist.”

Allen’s mother attended the closing arguments but left the courtroom before Richardson showed the video from inside the Roscoe’s that showed the first muzzle flash from the shooter’s gun. Speaking to Rolling Stone on Monday, Deannea said it had been “devastating” when she saw the autopsy photo of her son that was shown on a courtroom screen at the start of Richardson’s closing.

The grieving mom called Trone’s alibi story “ridiculous.” “I’m here to get justice. I want justice. This was my son, my child,” Deannea said. “I want the jury to know he has a family who loves him and wants to support him.”

For his part, Jones said he played no role in the alleged father-son robbery plot. His defense lawyer, David Haas, reminded jurors Tuesday that his client was not charged with murder, only two counts of robbery and one count of conspiracy. He said Jones was well-known at the Roscoe’s, so the theory he handed Trone a gun in full view of a Roscoe’s security camera made “no sense.” Haas also highlighted the lack of any phone calls or electronic communication the day of the shooting beyond a single 1-second cell phone connection between Trone and Jones that he dismissed as meaningless. “This case is so thin,” Haas said in his closing argument. “What if Mr. Jones is simply a weed dealer?”

Allen’s stunning murder rocked the hip-hop community. The Philadelphia-bred artist became a breakout star in 2016 with his triple-platinum single “ Selfish .” That same year, Rolling Stone named him a New Artist You Need to Know . He went on to reach crossover fame with collaborations such as his 2019 feature on Ed Sheeran ’s “ Cross Me. ”

After the slaying, Allen’s fiancée faced a barrage of accusations that her Instagram post about her meal at the Roscoe’s that day led the shooter to their location. When Sibounheuang testified, her since-deleted post was shown to the jury. She confirmed it didn’t specify which Roscoe’s location she was at and only showed her food. Considering the couple didn’t even receive their food until 1:12 p.m., according to video inside the Roscoe’s, the post would have coincided with, or come after, Trone’s meeting with Jones in the restaurant’s parking lot. Richardson argued that it was Jones seeing the diamond-encrusted rings, chains and watches on the rap artist during their fist-bump at 12:31 p.m. that set the robbery plot in motion, not the post. The jury agreed.

“We considered the Instagram post, but in terms of timing, it just wasn’t plausible. Also, the picture was only the plate of food. There was nothing of Rakim, nothing of Stephanie, no jewelry in the pictures, so the evidence from that specific post didn’t cause enough reasonable doubt,” Lovo, the jury foreman, tells Rolling Stone .

In her harrowing testimony, Sibounheuang gave her firsthand account of how the hip-hop star pushed her out of the way to save her life. “He’s heroic. He’s a hero. [Other men] would never,” she told Rolling Stone as she left the courthouse.

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