After a hung jury earlier this year, two men face a second trial for a murder along the Schuylkill River Trail

Three men walked onto the Schuylkill River Trail in March 2023, Montgomery County prosecutors said Monday, but only two walked out. And those men now find themselves in front of a jury for the second time this year, accused of killing an acquaintance and dumping his body along the wooded trail.

Cody Reed and Marquise Johnson, both 24, have been charged with murder, robbery, conspiracy, and related crimes for allegedly luring Daquan Tucker to the trail and shooting him to death. Investigators say they also stole his wallet and cell phone.

Tucker, 25, was found at the bottom of an embankment near the trail the next morning by a passing cyclist, according to the affidavit of probable cause for Reed and Johnson’s arrests. He had been shot multiple times, including twice in his neck, with a .40 caliber handgun.

In February, a jury was unable to reach a verdict in the case during the two men’s first trial. The group’s effort to reach consensus in eight hours of deliberation was hampered by a single juror, according to a person familiar with the deliberations.

While addressing members of the second jury Monday, Assistant District Attorney Caitlin O’Malley urged them to examine the evidence in the case logically.

“When you hear three men walked into the woods, two men walked out of the woods, and one was found dead there, what does your common sense tell you?” O’Malley asked the panel in her opening statement.

The night before Tucker’s body was found, he was recorded on surveillance cameras walking with Reed and Johnson a few blocks away from an entrance to the Schuylkill River Trail on Cain Street in Norristown. An hour later, only Reed and Johnson were seen walking elsewhere in the borough.

O’Malley noted that Reed and Johnson both left their cell phones at Reed’s apartment in Norristown before going for their late-night walk, something she said was unusual. The two also walked a different way home from the trail and immediately drove to Philadelphia after arriving back at Reed’s apartment.

Tucker’s girlfriend later told detectives that Reed had ordered him an Uber to take him to Reed’s apartment in Norristown on the night of the murder. Later that night, Tucker’s girlfriend used a “Find my iPhone” app to track his location to a wooded area off the trail. When she called him, concerned, he told her everything was fine, and that he was with Reed in the woods.

“These aren’t all coincidences,” O’Malley said. “These aren’t the unluckiest men in the world. This was an agreement to kill Daquan Tucker.”

Attorneys for Reed and Johnson sharply rejected O’Malley’s theory of the case. They said prosecutors had relied entirely on circumstantial evidence. There were no eyewitnesses to the crime, no murder weapon was found, and no DNA evidence linked Reed and Johnson to the killing, they said.

“This case is short on facts and evidence and long on speculation,” said Johnson’s attorney, John McCaul. “The prosecution’s evidence reveals that someone else is responsible for Daquan’s death. Not my client, and not his friend.”

McCaul said the case against the two men hinged on cell phone records showing that Tucker’s cell phone followed roughly the same path that Reed and Johnson took away from the trail. But that evidence, he contended, was unreliable.

Reed’s attorney, Brendan Campbell, said the circumstances of Tucker’s death were entirely unclear.

“The commonwealth will spoon-feed you a version of events they believed happened,” he said. “But you’re not going to hear what happened, because nobody knows.”

The trial is expected to last through Friday before Montgomery County Court Judge William Carpenter.