Jennifer Gudnaya took the witness stand three days into the attempted murder trial of Aaron Alshaman and recounted her relationship with the former deputy, along with the night of the fire.
Alshaman, 29, of Lee Center, is accused of setting fire to a Utica residence on April 9, 2025 that was home to his partner, Jennifer Gudnaya, their child Ezekiel, and Gudnaya’s parents.
Gudnaya called 911 when they became overwhelmed with smoke in the interior of the residence, and fled outside with her infant child, and two parents.
Alshaman, the father of the infant, is charged with second-degree arson and four counts of second-degree attempted murder. Alshaman pleaded not guilty to all charges and bail was set at $250,000 or $500,000 cash bond.
He had been a member of the Oneida County Sheriff’s Office for around five years, serving from Sept. 2020 to March 2023 before serving shortly with the Rome Police Department and returning to the sheriff’s office on August 2024.
If convicted of his top charge alone, second-degree arson, Alshaman faces up to 25 years in state prison.
On June 17, Gudnaya took the stand and was asked about her relationship with Alshaman.
In 2023, Gudnaya said she started a friendship with Aaron Alshaman that started via calls and texts and in October 2023, their relationship became more physical.
When asked how long the relationship lasted, Gudnaya said over the months, their relationship grew distant. At an award ceremony put on by the Oneida County Sheriff’s Office, Gudnaya said she reconnected with Alshaman and started texting him again and realized he was dating someone else.
Still, Gudnaya and Alshaman continued their relationship and Gudnaya said on a few occasions, Alshaman visited her home when he was on duty, whether for a meal or for sex.
Gudnaya said in Feb. 2024, she hadn’t seen Alshaman for weeks and was getting fed up with how absent he had been. She went on to end the relationship with Alshaman and told Alshaman’s girlfriend about the relationship she had with him. But for the last time, the two of them had sex before Gudnaya left for work.
Not long after, Jennifer would learn she was pregnant.
“His initial reaction was to ask me if I was going to get an abortion,” Gudnaya said.
Angry and upset, Gudnaya said she wasn’t going to do that and asked Alshaman what role he wanted to have in the baby’s life. Alshaman told Jennifer that he needed to get his home life together. But the relationship between the two became even more strained.
“It would be days or weeks before he’d respond to me,” Gudnaya said.
On the stand, Gudnaya said that Alshaman had been increasingly distant and hard to get a hold of, saying his job was keeping him distant. When Gudnaya suffered from a premature pregnancy and gave birth to a two pound baby, she had reached out multiple times to Alshaman while she was in the hospital.
When asked if Alshaman ever visited her in the hospital, Jennifer said he didn’t. Seeing that Alshaman was not active or involved in the child’s life, Gudnaya told Alshaman that if he wouldn’t be a part of their child’s life, he would support them financially.
At that point, Alshaman contested paternity and demanded a test to prove Ezekiel was his child.
“I agreed, I had no doubt he was the father,” Jennifer said. It took two weeks to get Alshaman to take the test to get paternity test but when it came back, the results said that the likelihood Alshaman was the father was 99.9%.
Gudnaya went forward with getting child support and served Alshaman to go to family court.
“In the text messages, he said he’d rather work this all out instead of ‘airing dirty laundry’ in court,” Gudnaya said. “[But] he showed no initiative and he had indicated that he’d be easy to work with, but he hadn’t.”
Four months into Ezekiel’s life and Gudnaya said that they did $300 bi-weekly and when Ezekiel got older and needed more things like clothes, we’d go to $500 bi-weekly.
“Did he agree to that?” Oneida County District Attorney Todd Carville asked.
“I don’t think he ever responded,” Gudnaya said.
And when the $500 deadline came and Gudnaya alerted Alshaman to the change, she said he didn’t respond. However, on the first day that it would change over to $500, Gudnaya said the payment never came in.
“I texted him and told him that I assumed he wasn’t in agreement and we have to go back to court. He texted back and said he was sleeping,” Gudnaya said.
In February 2025, Gudnaya said that she got a lawyer and filed for full custody when she realized she had been “too nice.”
Gudnaya said she didn’t want to have Alshaman served because “…I knew he didn’t like to be served.” As such, Gudnaya told Alshaman he needed to pick up paperwork from her lawyer.
“He texted back and said, ‘What do you want now’ and ‘I’m already paying you $1000 a month,'” she said.
Gudnaya had tried to call Alshaman to talk and explain that the paperwork wasn’t about child support but custody and had to ask a coworker at the Oneida County Sheriff’s Office to talk to Alshaman for her.
“He told me he would pick up the paperwork at 10 a.m. on April 9, [2025],” Gudnaya said.
At around 3:45 a.m. on April 9, 2025, Gudnaya had fallen asleep after feeding her baby, only to wake up shortly after when she heard a “…very faint beeping sound.”
“I thought it was the refrigerator and I got out to check,” Gudnaya explained. “I could hear the smoke detector in the room adjacent to mine and I could smell something. I opened the door and the room was filled with white smoke.”
She checked the door to the outside and opening it, Gudnaya said the hallway filled with black smoke.
“I ran to go find my father and woke him up and told him there was smoke in the house.”
Brother’s testimony
Ben Gudnay, Jennifer’s brother, said previously on the stand he realized that Ring cameras and surveillance cameras had gotten popular and so he started going around the houses near his parent’s home and eventually found a house with cameras.
“I figured if I could see it, it could see me,” Ben Gudnay said. “I also found other houses that had Ring cameras, but they said it only recorded if it had movement.”
Gudnay was told by Paul Green Jr., the owner of the house and surveillance cameras, that he needed some time to go through the video and with no other leads, Ben started making his way home. But halfway there, Ben said he had been called by Green, who explained what he saw.
“I immediately turned around,” Ben said.
Ben said he looked over the footage with Green and saw someone walking up to his parent’s porch. “There was a spark, light, and suddenly it was just flames,” he said.
Gudnaya said she was shown this video and both she and Gudnay presented it to the Utica Police Department and Utica Fire Department.
After seeing the video, law enforcement asked the family if they had any enemies.
“My parents lived in that house for 20 years and never had any issues so they didn’t have any enemies,” Gudnaya said. “When they asked if anything big had happened recently, I told them the only big thing that had happened was that I filed for full custody.”
Law enforcement asked Gudnaya if she believed Alshaman would be capable of being the one who started the fire and she said, “I said I didn’t think Aaron was stupid enough to throw away his whole career by using a GPS tracked vehicle to start a fire.”
When they asked how Gudnaya was sure Alshaman was working that time, Gudnaya said she had been texted by Alshaman previously that he would pick up the full custody paperwork at 10 a.m. on April 9, 2025, after work.
This article originally appeared on Observer-Dispatch: Jennifer Gudnaya testifies on day 3 of the Alshaman trial
Reporting by Casey Pritchard, Utica Observer Dispatch / Observer-Dispatch
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Casey Pritchard, Utica Observer Dispatch | USA TODAY Network
