Attorneys for a man charged with murder are requesting for the dismissal of key evidence against their client ahead of his trial next month. They claim police failed to preserve evidence of another possible suspect and say a witness identifying their client, 33-year-old Zachary Phach, as the shooter in the 2012 killing, is unreliable.

According to the Portland Press Herald, police found and arrested Phach in California in 2021. He was indicted, along with 29-year-old Khang Tran, in connection with the shooting that killed Mathew Blanchard and injured two others in downtown Portland over a decade ago.

Phach is currently being held at the Cumberland County Jail on murder, aggravated attempted murder, elevated aggravated assault and criminal conspiracy charges.

Prosecutors dismissed most of the charges against Tran in 2022 and he pleaded guilty to criminal conspiracy in September that year. A Cumberland County judge sentenced him to four years in addition to time he had been serving in federal prison on an unrelated conviction.

Multiple witnesses told police that they saw two men running west on Congress Street after the shooting, however, the witnesses gave varying descriptions of them.

Police originally believed the shooting had been random, but following the arrests of Phach and Tran, stated in a press release that the suspects may have targeted the brothers due to unresolved “beef”.

According to police, at least three tips pointed to Mathew Sanders as a third suspect in the shooting. Two of the callers claimed Sanders bragged to them about shooting at Blanchard and his stepbrother and half-brother, Joshua Hersom, and John Howard Jr. Police say they investigated Sanders but found that the tips they had received were inconsistent and found no other evidence of his involvement.

Phach’s attorneys, however, say police didn’t conduct a thorough investigation or preserve any evidence that may have linked Sanders to the crime a decade later. They also say that police used informant Jorge Torres to identify Phach, who traded this information in exchange for a lesser charge on a crime he had been arrested for in 2014. The informant, they claim, is unreliable and may have been motivated to identify Phach for self-preserving reasons.