Testimony: Cellphones helped snag suspects

A federal agent testified Tuesday that records from the cellphone towers near the Wyandanch post office helped track down the suspects accused of robbing that facility, as well as a Far Rockaway jewelry store and six banks on Long Island and Queens.

Postal Inspector Tosha Dennis said she suspected that the October 2009 early morning robbery of the post office was an inside job because the thieves were familiar with the security arrangements at the Wyandanch facility.

Dennis testified Tuesday in federal court in Central Islip at the trial of two South Ozone Park cousins accused of a heading a robbery crew: Sharod Williams, 39, and Travis Walker, 25.

In her testimony, Dennis said she obtained all the cellphone numbers that had used the towers in Wyandanch around 5 a.m. on the day of the robbery and compared them with the cellphone records of post office employees. The records were obtained from several cellphone companies by subpoena during the robbery investigation.

The cellphones of Walker and Williams, who lived 28 miles from the Wyandanch post office, were used six times to make phone calls to each other from near the building at the time of the robbery, Dennis said.

And the only post office employee whose cellphone records indicated a call was made to any of the cousins in the weeks around the robbery was that of Wyandanch postal clerk Stephanie Lloyd, Dennis testified. In October alone there were 467 calls between Lloyd's and Walker's phones, the inspector said.

Lloyd, who has also been charged in connection with the post office robbery, told investigators that Walker was her boyfriend and had asked her about details of the post office's operation, but denied that she or he had been involved in the robbery, according to federal prosecutors Lara Treinis Gatz and Thomas Sullivan.

Eventually, Dennis testified, her investigation linked up with that of Nassau and New York detectives, along with federal agents from the Bureay of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, who were investigating Williams' and Walker's involvement in the bank and jewelry store robberies, also partly through cellphone records.

Williams' attorney, Randi Chavis, and Walker's, Glenn Obedin, have maintained that the cell records only showed that their clients' phones were near the scene of the robberies, not that their clients were there using them.