So when Copney found more relics of the old relationship, he was furious.

One day while Smith was at work at Harvard Student Agencies, Copney came across online chat conversations between Smith and her ex-boyfriend and uncovered an envelope with photographs of the former couple.

“You’re still keeping shit from me,” he said angrily as they walked to Tommy’s Value, the Mt. Auburn St. convenience store, Smith recalled in court testimony.

Copney left for New York the following morning.

About a month after the fight, Copney and Smith decided to start dating again. Copney moved back to Harvard, and about six weeks later, he invited his friends to join him there to conduct a robbery.

III.

Much of the prelude to the Kirkland shooting unfolded in Smith’s Lowell House dorm room.

There, Copney and his friend Blayn Jiggetts attended a party during Harvard-Yale weekend where they met a Yale drug dealer whom they would later allegedly rob at gunpoint of three pounds of marijuana.

There, Copney brought Jiggetts and Jason F. Aquino on May 18, 2009, planning to commit a duplicate robbery in Cambridge.

And there, Jiggetts loaded a semiautomatic pistol—the weapon that would kill a man before the day was out.

Posing as Harvard students, Copney and Aquino went to meet Justin Cosby, a 21-year-old Cambridge drug dealer whom Copney had met with the day before and arranged to buy a large quantity of marijuana. They urged Cosby to follow them to Kirkland’s J-entryway to conduct the deal.

In the entryway basement, Jiggetts pulled a gun on Cosby, and the three New York men told the drug dealer to hand over his wares. When Cosby refused and tried to run from the entryway, one of the men—Copney, according to Aquino, Jiggetts, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts—took the gun and fired three shots.

One bullet struck Cosby in the abdomen, and, by the next morning, he was dead.

While Cosby staggered down Dunster Street bleeding and asking for water, the three men returned to Smith’s room in Lowell.

Then Copney handed the gun to Smith. She took the weapon, rushed two entryways over to her blockmate’s room, and hid the firearm under her blockmate’s bed. Then she called a taxi to serve as their getaway car, taking them to South Station where they boarded a bus to New York.