Chester County man guilty in shooting death of two women, one of them pregnant with his son

A Chester County man was convicted of three counts of first-degree murder late Friday for killing two women he was dating, one of them pregnant with his unborn son.

Mamadou Kallie, 26, shot Kimberly Ortiz-Zayas, 21, and Tiara Rodriguez-Diaz, 20, at point-blank range in May 2022.

In court Friday, he took the stand and vehemently denied shooting the women, who he said had been killed by a masked gunman.

Prosecutors called that contention “ludicrous.“

The women were found dead on Glencrest Road in Valley Township on May 29, 2022. They had been executed, prosecutors said during Kallie’s five-day trial, shot in the head and neck at point-blank range. Rodriguez-Diaz’s 22-month-old son with Kallie was strapped into his car seat in the backseat of the car when the gunfire rang out, prosecutors said.

First Assistant District Attorney Erin O’Brien said in her closing arguments that Kallie had subjected the women to physical and emotional abuse for years, but always managed to reel them back in with declarations of love.

Kallie’s attorney, Daniel Miller, told jurors Kallie’s tumultuous relationship with the women did not mean that he killed them.

“We’re not disputing that this man had difficulties, if we’re being polite, with his relationships with these women,” Miller said. “But that’s not why we’re here.”

On Memorial Day weekend three years ago, O’Brien said, Ortiz-Zayas, who was pregnant with Kallie’s son, had finally had enough. She contacted Rodriguez-Diaz and told her Kallie had been dating them both at the same time.

“She had enough of the lying, enough of the torment, enough of all the things he did to her, not only over a period of a few hours, but over a few years,” O’Brien said. “She wanted to be left alone. She wanted her baby boy and a life without him.”

The revelation sparked a heated argument between Rodriguez-Diaz and Kallie at a friend’s cookout in Coatesville, and police had to separate them so she could safely drive home.

Not long after, O’Brien said, the two women met to discuss the love triangle and both decided to leave Kallie.

But Kallie, the prosecutor said, decided that if he couldn’t have them, no one could. He called both repeatedly, and when Ortiz-Zayas answered one of his calls and told him she and their son were in a car with Rodriguez-Diaz, O’Brien said, he drove there, chased after the women after they drove away, and rammed his car into the vehicle, forcing them to stop.

Surveillance video from a nearby home recorded the audio of the crash, followed by 10 distinct gunshots. Ortiz-Zayas can be briefly heard begging Kallie to stop, reminding him that his son was in the car.

“He executed them on the side of the road because he couldn’t get what he wanted anymore,” O’Brien said.

Kallie, in his testimony Friday, got into a heated exchange with O’Brien, whom he accused of lying.

“All you’re trying to do is paint me as a bad guy,” Kallie told the prosecutor. “That’s your job.”

Kallie testified Friday that he had received an anonymous threat on his life from an unknown number shortly before the shooting, and had frantically raced to find Rodriguez-Diaz and Ortiz-Zayas to warn them. He was afraid, he said, that the person after him would also target them.

While driving after them, Kallie said, he saw a masked gunman standing in the road, swerved to avoid him, and crashed his car. The gunman then killed the women and fled, he said.

Kallie said he grabbed the murder weapon, which the gunman dropped, and chased after him. That, he explained, was why he had the gun on him when police cornered him at a Wawa not long after. He held officers at bay during a 40-minute standoff, he said, because he doesn’t trust the police.

“I be seeing what they be doing to Black people,” Kallie said.

O’Brien told jurors Kallie didn’t call the police to report the shooting — or even summon an ambulance — because he was the one who shot them, and he knew they were dead.

After fleeing the scene of the shooting — and before police caught up with him at the Wawa — O’Brien said, Kallie took his toddler son, who was covered in his mother’s blood, to a neighborhood friend and said he had “killed his baby moms.”

In light of what she said was overwhelming evidence, O’Brien urged the jurors to convict Kallie of first-degree murder.

“That story he told you in this courtroom was preposterous,” she said. “It was not only not supported by evidence, it was not supported by common sense.”

Kallie’s conviction carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison. He will be formally sentenced in the coming weeks.