Quick Take
After a yearslong pretrial process, the trial of one of the suspects in the murder of tech and cannabis executive Tushar Atre is finally set to begin Monday with opening statements. The four defendants will be tried separately over the coming year.
After years of legal proceedings and a decision to try each of the four defendants separately, the trial for one of the men accused of kidnapping and murdering tech and cannabis executive Tushar Atre in 2019 is expected to finally get underway this week, when attorneys are set to give their opening statements and begin calling witnesses.
The jury in the trial of suspect Stephen Lindsay was selected and sworn in in mid-December. Assistant District Attorneys Michael McKinney and Tara George, the prosecutors on the case, did not respond to Lookout’s request for comment on what kinds of witnesses would take the stand first.
Lawyers for the defendants successfully argued in October that a joint trial would be unfair, especially for Lindsay. Unlike the other three men charged in the case, Lindsay never spoke to investigators after his arrest. His co-defendants — Joshua Camps and brothers Kaleb and Kurtis Charters — gave hours of interviews to investigators in which they implicated themselves and each other.
Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office investigators found the 50-year-old Atre fatally shot and stabbed in the Santa Cruz Mountains close to his cannabis farm on Soquel San Jose Road, near the summit, on Oct. 1, 2019. Atre was the chief executive of AtreNet, a web design and marketing firm, and also ran Interstitial Systems, a cannabis business.
According to the sheriff’s office, Atre was kidnapped from his home in the 3000 block of Pleasure Point Drive just before 3 a.m. that day, when he was last seen getting into his girlfriend’s white 2009 BMW SUV.
Neighborhood surveillance cameras showed three people leaving an alley on Pleasure Point Drive and approaching Atre’s house, CBS News reported. Guests staying with Atre said they heard voices discussing a safe, followed by commotion, but officers did not find evidence of forced entry or ransacking. Investigators later found $80,000 in a safe in Atre’s bedroom, but said the suspects were unable to open it. Other surveillance footage showed Atre running down a street in his neighborhood with his hands bound. Authorities confirmed the identity of the body to be Atre’s on Oct. 2.
The four suspects — Stephen Lindsay, Kurtis Charters, Kaleb Charters and Joshua Camps — were arrested in May 2020 and charged with murder, kidnapping and robbery. Investigators said Lindsay and Kaleb Charters were Atre’s former employees at the cannabis farm. When detectives interviewed Lindsay and Kaleb Charters, they admitted that they had a dispute with Atre over payment, but denied returning to Santa Cruz after they stopped working for Atre. Lindsay and Kaleb Charters had moved to Las Vegas following the murder.
The trial was originally set for March 2024. However, the case has navigated a long and complex legal path, with defense attorneys filing numerous motions to exclude evidence. In July 2023, Lindsay’s defense counsel sought unsuccessfully to exclude documents and surveillance footage from a Las Vegas gym.
Lindsay’s attorney, Marsanne Weese, asked the court for a hearing to determine whether law enforcement officers had made false statements to obtain search warrants for that surveillance footage. Prosecutors had said the Las Vegas footage matches the appearances of Lindsay and another suspect, Kaleb Charters — including one of the men’s distinctive walk and stance — with those of figures captured in surveillance footage from near Atre’s Pleasure Point residence around the time Atre was killed.
Weese contended that investigators had misconstrued a witness’s identification of Lindsay and Kaleb Charters in footage from Atre’s home. That witness, Ben Hoyt, had previously worked with Lindsay and Charters. Weese said investigators wrote in the warrant that Hoyt had positively identified the suspects in the Pleasure Point video with certainty, when he never actually did. She added that Hoyt was biased because he told police he previously thought the two were “suspicious.” Santa Cruz Superior Court Judge Stephen Siegel ultimately rejected the challenge.
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