Quick Take
The four men charged in the 2019 kidnapping and murder of tech and cannabis entrepreneur Tushar Atre in Pleasure Point will each have their own trial after a Santa Cruz County Superior Court judge agreed that it was the best way to give each defendant a fair trial. The men are due back in court on Dec. 10.
Four men charged with the 2019 kidnapping and murder of 50-year-old tech and cannabis entrepreneur Tushar Atre in Pleasure Point will be tried separately. Santa Cruz County Superior Court Judge Stephen Siegel agreed with defense attorneys’ arguments last week that the fairest path forward for the co-defendants in a case that has taken years to reach trial is to have separate juries for each.
On Oct. 1, 2019, Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office investigators found Atre fatally shot and stabbed in the Santa Cruz Mountains near his cannabis farm near the summit on Soquel San Jose Road. Four suspects — Stephen Lindsay, 26, Joshua Camps, 28, and brothers Kaleb and Kuris Charters, 23 and 26, respectively — were arrested in May 2020.
At the time of the arrest, investigators said Lindsay and Kaleb Charters were former employees of Atre who they believed had been in a dispute with the entrepreneur over pay. Atre was the chief executive of AtreNet, a marketing and web design firm, and also ran the cannabis business Interstitial Systems.
The case has been in pre-trial proceedings since. The defense has brought a number of motions to the court over the years, some of which aimed to suppress pieces of evidence via Franks hearings — court dates that determine whether an officer made false statements to obtain a search warrant that yielded incriminating evidence.
The decision to divide the case into four separate trials began with a filing from Lindsay’s attorney, Marsanne Weese, in late May. She argued that while the other defendants implicated each other and themselves in hourslong interviews with law enforcement officers, Lindsay did not give an interview after his arrest. She argued that keeping the four together in one trial would be “fundamentally unfair and violate Mr. Lindsay’s right of confrontation and cross-examination.”
“The trial that is plagued with prolonged incriminating statements of Mr. Lindsay’s co-defendants cannot be sanitized and Mr. Lindsay would not be able to cross-examine the multiple contradictory statements by the co-defendants,” she wrote in a court filing.
Weese also argued that redaction of interview transcripts to give her client a fair trial would not only be problematic, but likely impossible, as it would require a redaction of three different co-defendants’ statements. The editing of all statements could render the transcripts difficult to follow and analyze, she said.
“The complexity of this case makes severance necessary because redacting or altering the statement to avoid all references to Mr. Lindsay will cause the statements to be ambiguous and misleading,” she wrote in a court document.
Santa Cruz County Assistant District Attorney Michael McKinney disagreed with Weese’s evaluation of redactions, and said that it is possible with the use of neutral pronouns so as to not implicate any one defendant.
Art Dudley, Kaleb Charters’ attorney, told Lookout on Monday that because Lindsay made no statement to investigators, and the other three co-defendants did, there is “no way you could try all of them together.” He said that all four men still face lengthy trials.
“The trials will have all of the same things happening, except their statements,” Dudley said. He added that there was brief discussion about simply splitting the defendants into just two trials with two defendants in front of two separate juries, but that path would be “a nightmare” logistically.
The four co-defendants are due back in court on Dec. 10 to determine future trial dates.
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