Caught on Tape: Last Seconds Before Rian Thal's Murder

Victims were ambushed

By KAREN ARAIZA

Updated 7:48 AM EST, Tue, Jun 30, 2009

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The Navona/Piazza at Schmidt's

Police released surveillance video of Rian Thal and Timothy Gilmore, seconds before they were murdered at the Navona on Saturday. The video shows the two getting off an elevator on the seventh floor of the complex. They both look around as if they hear something and then continue down the hallway. Four seconds later, two men come out of the stairwell door right by the elevator. Another shooter was at the other side of the hallway, said police.

"They're trapped because they have another shooter at the other end of the hallway, so it was very well organized," said Capt. James Clark with the Philadelphia police. "Some words were exchanged and at that point, she was shot and killed," said Clark. Gilmore was shot several times and tried to make his way back to the elevator before he died. The suspects calmly left the building and are still on the run. Here is an edited version of what police say happened:

A second part of the surveillance video shows how the gunmen got into the complex. One follows a tenant in and later lets in two other gunmen. A fourth man, who police say was the lookout, waited downstairs. And police are looking for a fifth man, a friend of Timothy Gilmore's, who was waiting in Thal's apartment. He later walks out and calmly steps over the bodies to escape, "just as the killers had done only minutes earlier," according to The Daily News.

Investigators say Thal and Gilmore were both dealing drugs and suspect that's what led to the murders. They found four kilos of cocaine and $100,000 inside Thal's apartment. Thal was kidnapped and robbed by drug dealers in 2004, police sources told The Daily News. After she was released, Thal refused to identify her captors. That elevated her "from hanger-on to one of the players," a law-enforcement source told the paper.

Thal, 34, an event planner and promoter known as "the white girl" in the hip-hop nightlife scene, became a big-time dealer with a specialty powder cocaine she supplied to other dealers, sources told the paper. Her funeral is today.