Monessen men charged with attempted homicide
MONESSEN – A Monessen man is facing charges he brought a small-caliber pistol to a gunfight early Sunday with another man from the city who was armed with an assault rifle.
Both suspects, Delaney Dionte Huggins, 29, of 528 10th St., and James Steven Womack, 25, of 631 Summit Ave., are facing attempted homicide and related charges and are wanted on warrants signed Wednesday by a district judge in Rostraver Township.
“In my experience as a police officer, the behavior exhibited by both Womack and the AK-47 assailant were consistent with a preplanned rendezvous or shootout between feuding individuals,” the investigating officer, Jeffrey Smaracheck, noted in the affidavit supporting the criminal charges in the case.
The investigation began shortly before 2 a.m. when Smaracheck was dispatched by Westmoreland County 911 to 10th Street and Knox Avenue over complaints that as many as 20 gunshots were fired in the area.
A crowd there scattered when police arrived, and once the officer determined there were no victims at the scene, he decided the “call was generally unfounded at this point,” the affidavit indicates.
With help from police in nearby Charleroi, the officers set out to look for evidence of gunfire.
A second dispatch was received from 911 to investigate a complaint from a resident of the 600 block of Knox Avenue about a man being on his front porch asking for help and saying at least two other men were trying to shoot him.
Police approached the man on the porch, who appeared to have a flesh wound from a bullet on the right side of his head or neck, but he ran away. The man later was identified as Womack, court records allege.
A short time later, police were dispatched to the Okay Lodge in the 500 block of 10th Street over a complaint involving a woman’s parked car that had been riddled with bullets. The car’s rear and passenger side windows had been shot out, and there were as many as eight bullet holes on its driver’s side. The officers found 18 casings from an AK-47 and a cellphone on the ground in the same area.
While processing the evidence, police received yet another 911 dispatch about a man in Mon Valley Hospital’s emergency room with a gunshot wound to his lower hip that he suffered earlier in Monessen.
Police were told the victim was Huggins and that he was in stable condition, according to the affidavit.
Huggins told police he “became caught up in the crossfire” when one or two men sprayed a crowd with bullets from AK-47 rifles as he walked to the Okay Lodge. He also told police he ran from the area and called his mother to get a ride to the hospital, the court record alleges.
The gunfight was captured on a police surveillance camera and allegedly showed a man with a long rifle aiming solely at Womack, who fired back at the other gunman with a revolver while taking cover behind the car that was damaged.
Police later obtained a warrant to search the phone and identified Huggins as its owner, leading the investigator to believe Huggins dropped it when he fell after being shot, the record indicates. He also was identified through “selfies” discovered in the phone’s gallery of photographs.
“Huggins now went from being a victim to a suspect in the case,” the officer noted in the affidavit.
Womack and Huggins are each charged by Monessen police with attempted homicide, possession of a firearm prohibited, aggravated assault, firearms not to be carried without a license, possessing an instrument of a crime, making terroristic threats, simple assault with a deadly weapon and reckless endangerment.
Staff writer Gideon Bradshaw contributed to this story.