'Don't say nothing:' witnesses feared speaking up in double homicide trial
- Jamie Duffy
- Sep 25
- 5 min read
FORT WAYNE, Ind. ---Maybe because of memories of a lost romance or loneliness, or because of fear or coercion, or maybe the awkward hope of a diamond ring, Priya Whitt kept her silence for years.
“Don’t say nothing,” she was told and Reginald Gant and Gregory Robinson expected her to keep her mouth shut.
But something made her change her mind two years ago.
Perhaps, it was the haunting image of Anton Moore in the front seat of her 2005 Hyundai Sonata, shot twice in the back of the head by Gant as she drove around Fort Wayne. Robinson, she told police, was in the back seat behind her.
From left: the players in the alleged double homicide - Gregory Robinson, Priya Whitt, Reginald Gant
Just after that took place, Priya said she was there when Gant and Robinson stabbed Moore’s girlfriend, 30-year-old Jaime Klein, with a kitchen knife while Klein’s little girl watched until Whitt pushed her inside a room to save her from the same fate.
Whitt was the star witness Thursday in Allen Superior Court when videos of Whitt’s recorded police interviews were played for the jury, Judge David Zent presiding.
On trial, Gregory Robinson, now nearly 43 years old, sat at the defense table, charged with two counts of murder and a Felony 5 for assisting a criminal with murder.
For the moment, Gant sits in federal prison for narcotics convictions. It’s expected he will be tried for murder in this case, too, Chief Deputy Prosecutor Tom Chaille told The Probable Cause.
In January 2024, Whitt appeared with her attorney, Robert Scremin, and pleaded guilty to two counts of assisting a criminal, a Level 5 felony, sentences she will serve consecutively, meaning one after the other. Online court documents indicate she was released under court monitoring.
Her latest sentencing date is Sept. 30, the week after Robinson’s trial.
Cooperative and compliant, Whitt told the chilling story of the two brutal murders that took place between the night of Oct. 18 and morning of Oct. 19 nine years ago.
Why did Gant, Moore's childhood best friend he called a brother, want to kill Moore? New Haven Police Department detective James Krueger asked her.
“He said he snitched or something of that nature,” Whitt said. They also apparently sold drugs together.
Whitt said she tried to stay away from it and, as indicated by court documents submitted by Krueger, Whitt and Robinson had been dating. A witness said Gant had an obsessive dislike of Klein and was jealous of her relationship with Moore.
Two witnesses placed Anton Moore, 30, in the parking lot of the Show Girl strip club next to his motel, Country Hearth, on Goshen Road, a motel condemned in 2017. Robinson and Gant picked him up there, court documents said.
Another witness called detectives in August 2023 to say that Whitt visited her around 3:30 a.m. the morning after the killings and “was not acting right.” Whitt then told this witness that “Reggie’s best friend just got killed and they did it right in front of me.”
This new witness said a girl dropped off Anton at the home where Priya and Robinson were living. After that they went to a strip club up the street where Anton sold some drugs. Anton got back in the car in the front passenger seat. They went back to Priya’s home and drank before getting back into the car to drive to New Haven and go by “the girl’s house,” court documents said.
While they were driving around, Reggie shot Anton in the back of the head and then Whitt was ordered to go back to the house. They dragged Anton out of the car and put his body in the garage. Then Whitt drove Reggie and Greg back to Klein’s house to finish their deadly work, court documents say.
Whitt reported that she was “freaking out” when Anton was shot in the car, but one wonders what was going through the minds of the other two.
Was it revenge?
Here’s a clue to that in court documents: “Gregory approached him again and said 'I know you know what the f—k happened, you know we killed Anton, so if you say something we will kill you too'….Gregory accused Anton of being a ‘Snitch’ and that he got what he deserved.”
At Klein’s home, Whitt said in her recorded police interiew, that Klein let them in asking “Well, where’s Anton?”
Whitt recounted that Gant stabbed the young mother in both of her eyes. Whitt was “staying by the little girl’s door” and that the victim was screaming.
“Jaime wasn’t able to fight back” with two men attacking her. “He stabbed her and like, let go. I don’t know if he expected it.”
Gant also stabbed her in the torso and left the kitchen knife in her side, court documents said.
Was she saying anything? Whitt was asked.
“Jaime said she thought she was dead,” Whitt replied.
It came out in the interview that there was another person with them at Klein’s, but police have not been able to tie this man to the crime. Whitt says he was there, but “didn’t do anything.”
After ripping up the house looking for drugs and other items, Gant “stepped over her to get out,” a disrespectful gesture if there ever was one.
But they weren’t done, according to Whitt. They had to remove Moore from their garage and “find a place to take him out and dump him.”
Moore’s final resting place was a ditch in the 6600 block of Fairfield Avenue, before a man walking his dog around 8 a.m. found him.
About the same time the Fort Wayne police were alerted to the discovery of Moore’s body, Krueger responded to Jaime Klein’s home after a 9-1-1 call from a man who called to say he’d picked up a little girl he noticed wandering down State Road 930 East.
The little girl told him that “her mom was hurt and that she needed help,” court documents said. She later told Krueger that her mother “was lying down with her eyes open.”
That day, Fort Wayne and New Haven police realized they had a double homicide that was somehow related.
When Priya Whitt’s car was involved in a suspicious fire the day after, Oct. 20, Fort Wayne homicide detective R.J. Sutphin noticed the car fire occurred at Gant’s address. Sutphin got a search warrant for the car and had photographs taken. It was DNA from Klein’s murder scene that linked Gant to her.
With the passage of years, some phone records weren’t available, Krueger told the jury. However, some cell phone mapping put victims and defendants at the places witnesses reported.
And tantalizingly, somewhere on Hartzell Road in a culvert, evidence was left behind. What was it, we may never know, but Priya Whitt remembers something being tossed there.
Friday, Chaille will give closing arguments for the state of Indiana. Deputy prosecutor Ashley Skibinski is also working the case. Public defender Jamie Egolf, assisted by attorney David Felts, will represent Robinson.
Then the jury will make their decision.
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