‘I did something stupid’: It’s one co-defendant’s word against another at murder trial for retired East Bay police chief’s son

Tyrone McAllister, 24, is on trial facing charges he murdered 32-year-old Janath Liyanage during a robbery attempt that occurred hours after another robbery.

OAKLAND — An Alameda County jury has begun deliberations in the murder trial of a retired Union City police chief’s son, who is accused of fatally shooting a 32-year-old man during a 2019 attempted robbery.

Tyrone McAllister, the 24-year-old son of former Union City police Chief Darryl McAllister, faces charges that he killed 32-year-old Janath Liyanage, of Garden Grove, while his co-defendant and driver Dennis Evans waited in a vehicle down the street. Evans was set to join Tyrone McAllister at trial, but last December he made an about-face, taking a plea deal that allows him to get a five-year probation term in exchange for testifying in McAllister’s trial. But the deal makes Evans eligible for a 10-year prison sentence if his testimony isn’t deemed truthful.

McAllister testified in his own defense, refuting Evans’ accusation that he was the man who shot and killed Liyanage during a struggle on the 600 block of 20th Street in Oakland, at 11:13 p.m. on Aug. 20, 2019. Video of the killing shows a man approach Liyanage and a brief struggle, then a loud bang is heard and one of the men is seen running to a waiting vehicle.

Evans testified during trial that he and McAllister spent the day committing robberies around Oakland, including the gunpoint holdup of a man earlier in the day where they ended up with two bags of groceries. He claimed McAllister wanted to commit one last robbery that night, and after shooting Liyanage returned to the vehicle and told Evans, “I did something stupid.”

McAllister admitted to the earlier robbery of grocery bags, and his attorney, Annie Beles, told jurors to go ahead and convict him of that. But she said the two parted ways before the shooting.

“He didn’t do it. It hasn’t been proven to you,” Beles told jurors during closing arguments Tuesday morning. She later added that Evans “was going to say what he thought the prosecution wanted him to say.”

Deputy District Attorney Monica Brock, who is prosecuting the case, said that the surveillance footage of a “skinny” man running back to Evans’ vehicle matches a general description of McAllister, who testified he has “always had trouble keeping on weight.” But cellphone evidence clinches it, she argued, because a GPS tracker in McAllister’s phone placed it right at the shooting scene.

Afterward, McAllister got rid of the phone and used a much older model, telling friends he was “embarrassed” by it, Brock said, adding that McAllister also was planning to flee to Idaho at the time of his arrest.

“He was desperate to get rid of that phone,” because he knew it could link him to the killing, she argued.

Brock also said that McAllister was “frustrated” they only made off with groceries in the earlier robbery, showing jurors text messages that indicated he was hoping to rob a Rolex watch from someone and fund a trip to Las Vegas.

But Beles countered that the GPS evidence showed only that McAllister’s phone had been left in Evans’ car, not that McAllister himself was there. She said witnesses “were forced to” admit to law enforcement that the phone had not been used from four hours before the homicide until around 8 a.m. the following morning, an indication that McAllister had been separated from the phone.