Suspect in Church Street homicide pleads not guilty as officials address violent crimes in Burlington

Updated at 6:17 p.m.

The alleged shooter in a homicide Saturday morning on Church Street in Burlington pleaded not guilty to a first-degree murder charge on Monday morning.

Aaliyah Johnson, 22, of South Burlington, appeared remotely to enter her plea in Chittenden Superior criminal court. She was charged with shooting and killing 30-year-old Teville Williams, of Stowe, outside of Red Square, a Burlington bar.

Johnson was being held without bail. No date was set for her next court appearance.

The shooting — the first homicide in the city this year — was the most serious incident in a weekend that also saw an armed robbery and reports of gunshots fired in Burlington. At a press conference Monday afternoon, Police Chief Jon Murad and Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak addressed what they described as a rash of violent crimes in the city this month.

“Incidents like this, and the ongoing incidents that Burlington is struggling with, show how complex the community safety issues have been, and have been for a long time here in the city,” Mulvaney-Stanak said, pointing to investments the city has made in public safety in this year’s budget.

“It impacts our sense of safety, it impacts our sense of security here in the city, and I want to emphasize that my administration and my teams across departments are actively working on this in both long-term and short-term ways,” the mayor said.

Early Saturday morning, according to a police affidavit, Williams and Johnson got into an altercation inside Red Square after a dispute over drinks. A friend of Williams told police that Johnson and two of her friends accused Williams and his friend of taking their money.

A friend of Johnson then threw a drink in the victim’s face, according to the affidavit, and video footage from inside the bar showed Williams hitting Johnson and pulling her hair.

Both Johnson and Williams were then removed from the bar at different exits — Johnson from a side door onto Thorsen Way, and Williams out the front door on Church Street — according to the affidavit. Johnson then approached the front area of the bar, reached into her purse for a .45-caliber Glock pistol, and shot Williams multiple times while he was speaking to security outside, the court document stated.

Johnson fled the scene but later approached Burlington police officer Brady McGee, who was heading to the scene from Main Street.

“The female approached me to speak to me, and was crying hysterically and in an excited utterance exclaimed ‘… he hit me in my face, and pulled my hair…'” McGee wrote in the affidavit.

Johnson told him she had shot Williams, asked to be handcuffed and gave the officer her phone and purse with the pistol inside, McGee wrote, adding that Johnson stated that Williams had hit her “in the head multiple times.”

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Johnson was then arrested and transported to police headquarters. While there, she told McGee that she was a good person, that she hoped Williams was okay and that she carried a firearm downtown because she was “scared of men downtown,” McGee wrote in the affidavit.

Meanwhile, Thomas Young, a community service officer with the Burlington Police Department, responded to the scene outside of Red Square and observed a crowd of people shouting to call 911, according to the affidavit.

Cpl. Cory Campbell then arrived on the scene and applied a tourniquet and wound seals to Williams’ body, with a crowd of approximately 50 people in the area, the affidavit reads. Police said they had to push back the crowd to preserve the crime scene.

“A lot of people saw what happened at Red Square, and a lot of people heard it and a lot of people, far more than those who were just there, have felt its impact,” Murad, the police chief, said during Monday’s press conference.

A man who identified himself as a health care worker had been performing chest compressions on Williams when Campbell arrived, according to the police affidavit, and Campbell noted that several belts had been tied around the victim’s arm, “which I assumed was an attempt to act as a tourniquet,” he wrote.

An ambulance later arrived on scene and transported Williams to the University of Vermont Medical Center, where he was declared dead.

At Monday’s press conference, Murad pointed to other serious incidents that had happened over the weekend — including an armed robbery in Burlington’s Old North End, during which a man held up a convenience store clerk with a firearm demanding money and cigarettes — as well as more than a dozen violent crimes he said occurred prior to the weekend dating back to Aug. 9.

On Sunday night, police received multiple reports of gunshots near King and Battery streets. Murad said police recovered shotgun shells and shells associated with AR-style weapons. An unoccupied vehicle was later discovered on Locust Street with bullet holes and blood inside the car.

Both the car and ballistics were being further analyzed and investigated, Murad said.

Sunday night’s gunfire incident was the 11th of the year, he said. In 2022 — the worst year for gunfire in the city’s known history, Murad said, with 26 incidents in total — the city had 22 gunfire incidents by the end of August.

The most recent gunfire incident, and the homicide outside of Red Square, coincided with the beginning of the University of Vermont’s fall semester, with new and returning students moving into their dorms over the weekend.

Murad said the department had six officers, including himself, patrolling in the downtown area Friday night into Saturday morning. He added that “a typical Friday night five years ago” would have had “upwards of 20 to 30 police officers total” patrolling. Murad added that the department was seeing call volume on par with 2018.

“And we’re facing it with half as many police officers. That is a great challenge for us,” he said. “It’s simply inadequate for what we want to be able to provide to our community.”

Even before the weekend, Murad said the police had been dealing with violent crime incidents involving firearms. Large groups of suspects, often including juveniles, he said, had been involved in several incidents, including one in which a teen from New York was shot in the torso at the Andy “A_Dog” Williams Skatepark on the city’s waterfront.

During Monday’s press conference, Mulvaney-Stanak said the incident at Red Square was evidence that the city and state “really need more common sense gun laws.” She pointed to legislation she sponsored that would have included Burlington’s charter change from 2015 to prohibit guns at Burlington bars and other establishments with a liquor license.

“While this would not necessarily have prevented this, it is much overdue, needed policy on a statewide level,” she said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Suspect in Church Street homicide pleads not guilty as officials address violent crimes in Burlington .