Hours before Steve Jahn shot Megan Nieberle to death on a March evening this year, prosecutors said, he drove around Tredyffrin Township for hours with a gun in his hand.
In dashcam videos played in a Chester County courtroom Monday, Jahn is seen gripping a semiautomatic handgun in his Chevy Silverado truck, muttering to himself and glancing back and forth erratically as cars pass by.
Those utterances, prosecutors said, offer a view into the mindset of a man about to commit murder.
“Get out of the [expletive] way,” Jahn says an one point, one hand on the wheel, another on his firearm. “You don’t belong here.”
“Ya’ll [expletive] are dead,” the 44-year-old says in another clip.
Though it would be hours before Jahn, who police said was homeless, encountered Nieberle, a 53-year-old mother of three and a nurse at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, prosecutors used the videos from Jahn’s dashcam to bolster their contention that he had been prepared to harm someone that Saturday.
Jahn, a Berwyn native, was arrested a day after the March 7 shooting and charged with first- and third-degree murder, aggravated assault, and reckless endangerment.
The hearing marked the first time Jahn appeared in a case that shocked the Chester County community and kick-started a conversation about mental illness and firearms.
Some residents questioned why police did not act more forcefully to ensure that Jahn, who had been in a mental health crisis that day, was checked into a nearby psychiatric unit.
Jahn, wearing a red prison jumpsuit and sporting a beard, showed little emotion during the hearing, as Nieberle’s loved ones looked on, some in tears.
Assistant District Attorney Kathleen Wright said prosecutors had linked Jahn to the crime scene using GPS data from his vehicle, gunshot residue recovered from his hands and clothing, and remarks he made while in police custody.
Though the footage of Jahn was illuminating, Wright said, the shooting itself was not captured on the dashcam because Jahn had removed the device shortly before the shooting.
Wright called Tredyffrin police officers and county detectives to the stand to testify about the scene they had encountered near the intersection of Old State Road and Contention Lane, where Nieberle was found in the driver’s seat of her silver Acura SUV around 10:47 p.m. with a gunshot wound to the head.
She was bleeding heavily, the officers said, and was taken to a nearby hospital, where she died the next morning.
Chester County Det. Matthew Shumway of Chester County said data recovered from Jahn’s truck allowed investigators to identify him driving down the dimly lit residential street that night.
Approaching Nieberle’s vehicle, Jahn slowed his truck to 6 mph, Shumway testified. He fired once through her driver’s side window, the detective said, a shot captured on a neighbor’s doorbell camera.
Played in court, the short video showed Jahn’s headlights cut through the darkness and illuminate an approaching vehicle. Within seconds, a loud bang rang out.
Jahn’s attorney, Brian McCarthy, did not contest many of prosecutors’ assertions about how events unfolded that night, but he argued that first-degree murder was not appropriate because Jahn had not shown premeditation and intent to kill, conditions required to meet the threshold for that crime.
“What we did see does not establish murder in the first degree,” McCarthy said of the dashcam footage. The person in that video, he said, was a “troubled man looking back and forth, not a cold-blooded killer.”
Wright, the prosecutor, countered that Jahn’s actions were premeditated. She said Jahn had rolled down his window, aimed his weapon, and would have “had to have known” that there was someone inside an oncoming vehicle.
Of Nieberle, Wright said, Jahn “snuffed her life out and left her there to die.”
District Judge Patricia A. Zaffarano ruled that prosecutors had presented sufficient evidence for the case to proceed to trial on all charges.
Jahn will be formally arraigned on July 2. He remains in custody in the Chester County Correctional Facility after being denied bail in March.
