Two Galloway Township men charged with brandishing a gun just months after each was released from prison will remain jailed.
Both men were on parole and allegedly found in possession of drugs, with a gun recovered from inside the suspect vehicle.
Lynch, 32, was also on an ankle bracelet in a pending drug case.
The victims told police the two men walked up to the vehicle, with one — later identified as Lyons, 33 — pulling a handgun from his waistband and pointing it at the two while making threats.
“You don’t want to get shot today,” the other man said.
The victims said they did not know Lyons, but recognized the other man as Matthew Lynch.
But Lyons’ attorney said a gun is never seen in surveillance video of the incident.
“The entirety of the incident is captured on surveillance,” Durann Neil told the judge during a detention hearing Tuesday.
He claimed the video shows the men talking to a woman inside the vehicle and then going their separate ways.
“There’s never any firearm seen,” Neil said as Lyons nodded his head in agreement.
Assistant Prosecutor Matthew Mills said he had not yet seen the referenced video, but pointed out that a gun inside the suspect vehicle was clearly visible to police at the time the two were arrested.
The vehicle belongs to Lynch, Neil countered.
That seemed to contradict the defense presented by Lynch’s attorney, who said he expected Lyons would exonerate his client of the gun.
Lynch is “obviously not the heavy in this,” Peter Wujciak said. “He never held the gun. There’s not testimony that he ever held the gun.”
Both attorneys called the evidence in the case weak.
While Judge Patricia Wild agreed there may be issues with the gun, both men were found with a significant amount of drugs on them, she noted.
Lynch had 52 wax folds of alleged heroin, while Lyons had 75, according to the charges.
“A person on parole parole is not to be riding around with heroin in his possession and certainly not with handguns,” she said.
Lyons is the main caretaker for his two children and also works full-time, Neil told the judge.
Lynch is expecting a child.
Claiming the case against his client is weak, Wujciak said Lynch could wind up being held on the charges for six months to two years and end up without a conviction.
In the meantime, it would “hurt his relationship with his future child, his ability to assist in the child-rearing process,” Lynch’s attorney said.
“The first two years, his girlfriend isn’t going to be able to rely on him to weigh in on those morning feeds, those evening feeds,” he added before the judge interrupted.
Let’s not go down that sympathy route,” Wild said, citing the four years she spent in family court handling similar cases.
“I hear these pitches far too often for me to have much empathy for those types of things,” she said.
“I understand, judge, but in a lot of those cases you don’t have a drug addict who’s fighting to recover,” Wujciak replied.
“I have to disagree with you,” the judge said. “We had a lot of those cases there that involved drugs, unfortunately.”
Wujciak called Lynch “a poster child for someone who is trying. He is fighting hard to be an aspect in this child’s life.”
But the assistant prosecutor said Lynch already had been given a chance when he was released on pretrial monitoring with an ankle bracelet in a pending drug case that includes second-degree charges.
Both men will remain jailed.
The judge did tell Neil that if the video showing the incident does wind up illustrating there was no gun brandished, he would move to have Lyons’ detention reopened.
