On the day of his Dec. 6 arrest, Club Onyx disc jockey Andre Jason Pugh told police his lifelong friend hugged him at the northeast Atlanta strip club and said, "I killed your wife," East Point police Sgt. Allyn Glover testified Monday.
Adrian Harley, seated near Pugh at the defense table in Fulton County Magistrate Court for a preliminary hearing and a bond hearing, didn’t flinch when he heard the detective’s testimony that his childhood friend had tried to pin a murder on him.
“What did [Pugh] say he did when Mr. Harley said he shot his wife?” prosecutor Michael Sprinkel asked Glover.
“Continued DJing,” he said.
Pugh and Harley are charged with murder, conspiracy to commit murder and conspiracy to commit burglary in the Nov. 23 shooting death of Pugh's wife, Tiffany Jackson-Pugh. Police found the 30-year-old East Point woman in the couple's Lake Haven Way home. She had been shot twice, once in the torso and once through the eye. Their 2-year-old son was straddling her body.
Authorities previously said Pugh hired someone to kill Jackson-Pugh. Pugh and his wife were near a divorce, Glover testified Monday. In text messages, Pugh told his wife he would not permit her to have custody of their children, Glover said.
Cell phone records showed two calls between Pugh and Harley before and after the shooting, Glover said. Around the time an alarm went off at the family’s residence, the men’s cell phones put them near Andre and Tiffany Pugh’s home. A neighbor’s surveillance video shows two cars meeting on the street. In the video, one of the vehicles parks in front of the Pugh home. The video does not show anyone leaving or entering the vehicle, but it does show the car speeding away after the alarm sounds, Glover said.
The car speeding away is similar to Harley’s Infiniti, down to the same missing tail light, Glover said.
Harley told police he was at Club Onyx, then his Alpharetta home the day of the shooting. Pugh, known professionally as DJ Awesome, said he was en route to another strip club on Campbellton Road when he got a 5:50 a.m. call from ADT alarm company about a possible break-in through a dining room window.
Pugh, 34, requested the company turn off the alarm because “he did not want to wake the children,” Glover said. The couple’s two children and a third child they were babysitting were in the home at the time. Pugh told detectives he went home, entered the residence and saw what he thought was a body in his wife’s bedroom. Rather than approach to verify, Pugh checked on the children, Glover testified.
When East Point police Officer David Clickner arrived at the Pugh home, he found the popular DJ outside, waving his arms and shouting: “My kids are in there. She is not picking up the phone.”
Inside, Clickner made his way through the home to a bedroom and found the couple’s 2-year-old son on Jackson-Pugh’s chest, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution previously reported.
“What was the 2-year old doing?” Sprinkel asked Glover on Monday.
“He was trying to wake his mother up,” he said.
Harley was a family friend and carried Jackson-Pugh’s coffin at her Nov. 29 funeral.
Pugh’s Facebook page was loaded with condolences in the days after Jackson-Pugh’s death, but some of those changed to outrage after his December arrest.
The judge is expected to announce a decision on bond Tuesday.
