Christi Spicuzza pleaded for her life as the man in the back seat of her Nissan Sentra pressed a gun against her head, telling the man that she had a family and four kids at home, court paperwork shows.

Spicuzza, an Uber driver, had picked up 22-year-old Calvin Crew about 9:15 p.m. Feb. 10 and was supposed to take him from Pitcairn to Penn Hills, according to a criminal complaint filed against Crew.

“You’ve got to be joking,” Spicuzza, 38, told Crew as she took her right hand off the wheel to touch the gun against her head, the complaint said.

Police said a dashboard camera in Spicuzza’s car, purchased for her by her longtime partner, captured the exchange between Spicuzza and Crew before Crew took down the camera. After that, investigators said, several payment and banking apps were accessed on Spicuzza’s phone and she was killed and left in a wooded area in Monroeville.

“We believe this is a robbery,” Allegheny County Police Superintendent Christopher Kearns said Friday morning during a news conference at county police headquarters in Green Tree.

Assistant Superintendent Victor Joseph would not say how much money might have been taken, citing the ongoing investigation.

Family members at Spicuzza’s house declined to comment Friday.

During the exchange in the car on Feb. 10, police said Spicuzza told the man later identified by investigators as Crew, “Come on, I have a family.”

Crew told her that he did, too, the complaint said. He grabbed her long ponytail in his left hand to control her head and told her to drive.

“I’m begging you, I have four kids,” she pleaded, asking him to take the gun off the back of her neck, according to the complaint.

Crew told her to do what he said and “everything will be alright,” the complaint said. Seconds later, police said, he reached forward and grabbed the dashboard camera with his right hand. The video ended at 9:34 p.m.

Spicuzza’s boyfriend reported her missing that night after he lost contact with her and she never came home.

Police found the Nissan Sentra parked on Fourth Street in Pitcairn on Saturday morning. Four hours later, they said they found her body in a wooded area off Rosecrest Drive in Monroeville. She had been shot once in the back of the head, and police said they found a 9 mm shell casing on the ground near her body.

Investigators did not find Spicuzza’s cellphone or the dashboard camera at either scene, according to the complaint. A witness who contacted police the day that Spicuzza’s body was found reported finding a cellphone along railroad tracks beneath the TriBoro Expressway. Police said it was Spicuzza’s. The pink phone had a Bible verse as its background image, police said.

Investigators found the dashboard camera in Penn Hills.

“They got lucky there,” Joseph said. “They did a canvass. They did a recanvass. … One of the detectives was lucky enough to find that camera.”

From there, detectives began trying to reconstruct the last hours of Spicuzza’s life. Information from Uber showed that she had picked up her last fare, later determined to be Crew, at 9:13 p.m. on Brinton Road in Pitcairn, the complaint said. The user who requested the trip was later identified as Crew’s girlfriend, according to the complaint.

The girlfriend confirmed in an interview with police that Crew called her shortly before 9 p.m. Feb. 10 and asked her to order him an Uber, police said. She said the two spoke via FaceTime about 10:30 p.m., and it was dark wherever Crew was. She told police she was in Swissvale at the time, the complaint said.

Two hours later, he called her from the porch of their Brinton Avenue home and said he was locked out of the house, police said. The woman said Crew was there when she arrived home at 1:30 a.m., according to the complaint.

The woman also told officers that she bought a 9 mm pistol for protection in July but never bought ammunition. The woman told police the gun had gone missing after she took it to a birthday party for one of Crew’s family members, but she never reported it missing, the complaint said.

When asked whether she thought Crew had taken it, she told investigators she did, the complaint said. Crew denied taking the gun in a separate interview with police.

Crew, who was arrested on an unrelated warrant, told police in the interview that he had his girlfriend order the Uber trip for him so he could check for mail at his old address on Pershing Street in Penn Hills, according to the complaint. He said his driver dropped him off at his old address and then drove away, the complaint said. Crew said he retrieved some mail and then walked to a Port Authority bus station in Wilkinsburg to catch a bus toward home.

Police said no security cameras showed Crew in any of the places he said he had gone.

Crew’s mother, with whom Crew had lived at the address on Pershing Street, said any mail delivered to their old home is given to the landlord, who passes it on to them, the complaint said.

Data from Spicuzza’s cellphone indicated that after Crew tore down her dashboard camera, they traveled on Wallace Avenue in Wilkinsburg, at which point someone tried to use various money transfer applications on the phone, according to the complaint.

From there, the phone moved along the TriBoro Expressway, and Spicuzza’s license plate was captured at the intersection of the expressway and Monroeville Avenue about 10:10 p.m., the complaint said. At about 10:20 p.m., the phone was on Rosecrest Drive near where Spicuzza’s body was found two days later.

Police said the phone disconnected from the car’s Bluetooth at 10:21 p.m. and reconnected three minutes later.

From there, it traveled toward Pitcairn and ended up on Mosside Boulevard about 10:30 p.m., where the complaint said someone used a Dollar Bank app on the phone. The phone moved on Route 30 toward the Westinghouse Bridge, and a license plate reader caught the car near Warren Drive at 10:35 p.m., the complaint said. The phone stopped moving about 10:40 p.m. around the same place where it was found.

In addition to tracking Spicuzza’s phone location, police said investigators tracked Crew’s phone. Authorities said data showed that from between 10:44 p.m. and midnight, his phone was on Howard Street in East Pittsburgh, where his cousin lives. In an interview, the cousin said he could not recall whether Crew had been in his house during that time.

Security footage from Fourth Street where the Nissan was found showed the car circle the block before it parked about 12:20 a.m., according to the complaint. A person is seen walking from the area toward Corliss Way, less than a quarter-mile from where Crew and his girlfriend live, the complaint said.

Crew, who was adjudicated for a December 2014 robbery and did not have a permit to carry a gun, is charged with criminal homicide, robbery, illegal gun possession and tampering with evidence. He was taken to the Allegheny County Jail in Pittsburgh to await arraignment.

Staff writer Paul Guggenheimer contributed.

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