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Your Black Muslim Bakery #1, May 2002

After a wait of more than three and a half years, former Your Black Muslim Bakery leader Yusuf Bey IV and associate Antoine Mackey are going on trial on three counts of murder for the deaths of journalist Chauncey Bailey and two other men in Oakland in the summer of 2007.

Jury selection for the trial began in late January. Monday morning, about 100 potential jurors from a narrowed-down pool were brought into the courtroom of Alameda County Superior Court Judge Thomas Reardon.

By shortly after 11 a.m., 12 jurors and five alternates had been selected from that group.

Opening statements are expected to begin later in the day.

According to pretrial briefs she has filed, prosecutor Melissa Krum will tell jurors that she believes the evidence in the high-profile case will show that Bey ordered the murder of Bailey, the editor of the Oakland Post and a former reporter for the Oakland Tribune, on Aug. 2, 2007.

Krum will allege that Bey ordered the killing because he didn't like stories that Bailey had written about Bey's father, bakery founder Yusuf Bey. Bailey also reportedly planned to write a story about the bakery's financial problems.

The bakery went bankrupt and closed its doors in late 2007. The elder Bey, who founded the bakery in 1968, died of cancer in October 2003 while waiting to stand trial on charges of forcible rape, oral copulation and sodomy.

Former bakery handyman Devaughndre Broussard pleaded guilty on May 7, 2009, to two counts of voluntary manslaughter for fatally shooting both Bailey and Odell Roberson, 31, who was killed on July 8, 2007.

Krum said in her briefs that Bey, 25, wanted Roberson killed out of revenge. Roberson was the uncle of Alfonza Phillips, who was convicted of murdering Bey's brother, Antar Bey, on Oct. 25, 2005.

Broussard, who is expected to testify against Bey and Mackey, who's also 25, told prosecutors in 2009 that Mackey helped lure Roberson to his death and drove the car that was used in Bailey's killing.

Broussard also said that Mackey shot and killed the third victim in the case, 36-year-old Michael Wills, on July 12, 2007.

Krum alleges that Bey ordered Wills' killing because of "racial animus." Wills was white and Bey, who is black, randomly spotted him on the street near the bakery, according to Krum.

Broussard told prosecutors that Bey said his inspiration to have Wills killed was the so-called "Zebra killings" in San Francisco in the 1970s in which black suspects allegedly killed white victims simply because of the color of their skin.

Krum is expected to give her opening statement later on Monday. Gene Peretti, who represents Bey, and Gary Sirbu, Mackey's attorney, are expected to give their opening statements on Tuesday.