YOUNGSTOWN — Summit County Assistant Prosecutor Christopher DeLisio told jurors Tuesday that when two men with different caliber guns fired at Devin Bell, 26, while Bell sat in a car at the Shell gas station on South Avenue early Dec. 22, 2022, the bullets from either gun could have killed him.

When the gunfire stopped, one of the two men dropped a teal-handled knife, and gas station surveillance video shows him pick it back up and run from the scene. A Youngstown police officer and his dog “discovered the teal-colored knife, one of the weapons used in the commission of this murder,” DeLisio said during opening statements.

The remarks came on the first day of testimony in the aggravated murder trial of Akeem M. Hargrove, 32, in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court. Judge Anthony D’Apolito is presiding over the trial.

DeLisio and Brad Gessner, also of the Summit County Prosecutor’s office, are prosecuting the case because of a conflict of interest preventing the Mahoning County Prosecutor’s office from handling it.

DeLisio said jurors will hear from a woman who was a “former friend” of Hargrove, who told the woman that he had killed Bell. He said Hargrove told her, “Turn on the news.” She later told police she “did not want to be involved” in the murder and told police what she knew.

“She told police Akeem Hargrove had come by her house, had taken her 2014 Jeep Cherokee and left with a gentleman named Zachary Bair.” Hargrove returned the car later. “Importantly, she owned a set of teal-handled knives matching the one recovered from the scene,” DeLisio said.

Bair “has since confessed to committing the murder of Devin Bell with Akeem Hargrove,” DeLisio said. Cellphone records place Bair “in Youngstown before and after the shooting,” DeLisio said.

Bair is charged with the same crimes as Hargrove, and his case is still pending.

Defense attorney Stanley Booker told the jury that the vehicle that police believe was connected to the killing was swabbed for DNA, but none of it matched Hargrove, Booker said.

“There is zero direct evidence that my client is involved,” he said, adding that the woman who will testify against Hargrove “is involved. Zachary Bair is involved.”

He added, “You’re meant to be here, and your purpose is to free an innocent man.”

During testimony, prosecutors played a 2:24 a.m. Dec. 22, 2022, 911 call from a man who lived near the gas station and told a call taker, “A man just got murdered in a car in the parking lot” of the gas station. He said the killers left on foot and were dressed “all in black.”

The man said, “All I heard was boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom boom.”

Devin Bell’s mother and girlfriend testified during the trial, with his mother saying that Hargrove “grew up” with members of her family, including Devin and another of her sons. “When I saw Devin, I saw Keem,” she said of Hargrove. “He used to call me mom.”

Gessner, who is chief counsel for the Summit County Prosecutor’s Office and is a former Mahoning County assistant prosecutor, questioned her in depth about the way her son made money, with her acknowledging that he had been to prison, that he did not have a job but “had money,” including the November-December 2022 time frame in the months leading up to his death.

She said one reason she knew he had money was that he “came to my house in a BMW.” His girlfriend later testified that she made the arrangements with the previous owner of the car to buy it, and Bell paid $4,500 for it.

The morning her son died, she got a call from a man who told her that her son did not arrive where he was supposed to, and there was a car at the Shell gas station with yellow tape around it. She said she called her son’s girlfriend and picked her up, and they went to the gas station.

The police would not let her see who was in the car, but it was her son’s girlfriend’s car, she said. Then a man showed her surveillance video from a home near the gas station.

Gessner asked her to identify Hargrove, the man who was “connected at the hip” with her son, and she described the clothing he was wearing in the courtroom and identified him.

Bell’s girlfriend testified that when he returned from prison in August of 2022, Bell and Hargrove were close friends, but that changed around September or October of 2022, she testified. She said she did not know the reason.

Under questioning by Gessner, she said Bell had money around that time, but no job. She said she did not know where the money came from.