MARTINEZ — An alleged prison gang leader accused of ordering the murder of a man over his gang’s attempts to take over an Antioch “money block” has been released from jail after a judge lowered his bail to $200,000 in a pending murder case, court records show.
William Pree, 41, faces unresolved charges of murdering 23-year-old Kartiae Ely near East 18th Street and Cavallo Road in 2015. Pree and his co-defendant, 45-year-old Edward Robinson, were convicted of murder in 2017, only to have the case be overthrown by an appeals court earlier this year.
Both Robinson — the man accused of shooting Ely in the back of the head — and Pree filed motions to either be released from custody or receive bails lower than the $1 million standard for murder charges. On Friday, Judge John Kennedy granted Pree’s motion over the prosecution’s opposition and denied Robinson’s, clearing the way for Pree’s release from jail.
Pree’s motion says that he plans to stay with relatives in East Contra Costa. It also says that prosecutors have offered Pree a plea deal with no extra jail time, contingent upon Robinson also accepting responsibility for Ely’s homicide.
“Due to the fact that the offer is tied to his codefendant, he has been unable to accept the offer. To make matters worse, his codefendant was recently provided with new counsel, an event which will result in a substantial delay to the jury trial in this matter,” Pree’s lawyer, Sarah Eisenhart, wrote in the motion. “In this situation, where the prosecution has indicated that a credit for time served sentence is an appropriate punishment, to continue to hold Mr. Pree in custody is an unjustifiable intrusion on Mr. Pree’s constitutional right to pretrial liberty.”
Ely was shot and killed in September 2015, in the driveway of an apartment complex on 1824 Cavallo Road. The Antioch police investigation led to Pree and Robinson’s arrests later that year, on the theory that the two lured Ely to the area and that Robinson shot him on Pree’s orders, while Pree stayed in another part of town. During trial, the defense argued another man who had previously been a police suspect had actually shot Ely, and that Pree simply had nothing to do with the plot.
The trial exposed the inner workings of a prison gang known as Kumi 415, which branched off from the Black Guerrilla Family. Police testified that after the killing, Pree was found in a gang safe house in Vallejo containing several guns.
The First District Appellate Court found last June that a law passed after both convictions, SB 1437, invalidated the theories used to prosecute both men. After their case returned to the Contra Costa Superior Court, Robinson’s lawyer conflicted herself off of the case, resulting in a private attorney being appointed to represent him. That drastically postpones a potential retrial, since Robinson’s new attorney now has to bring himself up to speed.
