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A jury convicted an Arizona man Wednesday in the gunpoint robbery of an exotic dancer who was killed three years later in a murder plot that officials say he carried out with two other people.
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Cudjoe Young, 30, was found guilty of armed robbery and attempted armed robbery in connection with separate crimes targeting two women, including Mercedes Vega, in 2020, according to court records.
Neither the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, which tried Young, nor his attorney, Candice Shoemaker, immediately responded to requests for comment Wednesday evening.
Young also faces separate charges of murder, kidnapping, arson, theft, conspiracy and armed robbery with a deadly weapon connected to Vega’s killing in 2023. Young and his alleged accomplices, Jared Gray and Sencere Hayes, have pleaded not guilty.
Vega, 22, was found burned and shot, with blunt force injuries, in an abandoned car on an interstate west of Phoenix on April 17, 2023.
Prosecutors have alleged that the men killed Vega to prevent her from cooperating with authorities or as retaliation for cooperating. Vega’s mother has said her daughter was scheduled to testify in the robbery case the day she was found dead.
A masked, armed man robbed Vega outside her Phoenix apartment building after she had finished a late-night shift at a local club on Oct. 12, 2020, police records show. A masked, armed man tried to rob a second dancer from the club in that woman’s Phoenix-area parking garage weeks later but fled after a car appeared, authorities have said.
A third woman from the club told NBC News that she believes the same masked man targeted her outside her aunt’s Phoenix-area condo unit in 2019. She’d just finished a shift, she said, when the man appeared outside the home, pointed a gun in her face and took her belongings.
A spokesman for the Scottsdale Police Department, which investigated that robbery, said there was no evidence to link it to the other incidents.
In the robbery trial, the prosecutor pointed to cell tower data and other digital evidence that she said linked Young to the crimes. Young’s attorney described some of that evidence as unreliable and said her client was not “the guy with the gun.”
