A local rapper convicted of shooting and killing a female police officer nearly 20 years ago will live to see another day — and then some — thanks to a stay of execution granted by a Philadelphia judge.
Christopher Douglas Roney, a.k.a. Cool C, 45, was scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on Thursday, Jan. 8, 2015 after an execution warrant was signed last November by Gov. Tom Corbett.
On Jan. 7, we reported:
Philadelphia rap Pioneer Cool C is slated to be executed tomorrow (Jan. 8th). The rapper who was responsible for the hits “Juice Crew Dis”, “Glamorous Life”, “C Is Cool” and others has been in jail since 1996on charges of first-degree murder for the shooting death of Police Officer Lauretha Vaird.
According to Village Voice,
The shooting occurred in January 1996, when Roney, then 26, and two other men attempted to rob a Philadelphia PNC Bank branch. Roney shot Vaird, a 43-year-old mother of two, as soon as she stepped through the bank’s entrance, making her the first officer killed responding to a call in the city’s history.
To this day, Roney and his mother maintain his innocence, claiming they were eating together at the time of the robbery, despite a surveillance video, ballistic and forensic evidence, and three eyewitnesses linking him to the murder.
It was actually with Steady B (née Warren McGlone) that Cool C and associate Ernest Mark Canty attempted the 1996 heist that led to C’s conviction. According to McGlone, Canty had planned the robbery of a Philadelphia PNC Bank the morning of Tuesday, January 2, 1996. While Canty waited in the getaway van, parked in a Rite Aid lot across the street, McGlone and Roney ambushed the employees as they were opening the bank. The man believed to be Roney was seen in a surveillance video aiming a gun at the bank’s entrance. Officer Vaird, responding to the silent alarm, was shot by Roney as she entered the building. Assistant District Attorney Roger King argued the element of planning, including the specific pointing of the gun at the doors, was enough evidence to support a first-degree murder conviction.
The death penalty was sought for all three, but Canty and McGlone received life in prison without parole, while on November 1, 1996, Christopher “Cool C” Roney was sentenced to death. He’s since been an inmate of Pennsylvania’s State Correctional Institution at Greene. Former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell originally slated Roney’s death for March 9, 2006, but litigation issues caused it to be indefinitely delayed. Tomorrow, slightly more than nineteen years after the attempted robbery, Roney will be executed.
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