The last thing Sarah Wierstad did before she was killed was to beg the men who had broken into her home and robbed her to give her phone back, a Ramsey County prosecutor said Wednesday.

The 24-year-old woman said, “Please, please, can I have my phone back,” according to Assistant County Attorney Hassan Tahir. The single mother needed the phone to meet her 5-year-old daughter that night, Tahir said.

Tahir said that the last thing Wierstad heard was Albert George McIntosh saying, “You think this is a joke? I ain’t playing.”

McIntosh, 31, of Minneapolis, then used a handgun to shoot at Wierstad four times, according to Tahir. One of those bullets hit her in the heart, killing her, Tahir said.

In an opening statement in McIntosh’s trial for second-degree murder, Tahir said McIntosh was one of three men who went to Wierstad’s Railroad Island duplex on Bedford Street in St. Paul on the night of Oct. 18, 2015.

They broke into the home they thought was unoccupied but were surprised when Wierstad arrived home after a 45-minute bus ride following a day at work, according to Tahir.

Tahir said Wierstad’s daughter had been staying with her father, and Wierstad was looking forward to being with her that evening. Instead, she came home to find two strange men in her living room, Tahir said. The men forced her to the ground and took her purse, Tahir said.

The men left with a third man who was acting as a lookout, but Wierstad followed them, begging to get her phone back, Tahir said.

“He hears her plea for her phone, and he turns around and fires a shot,” Tahir said of McIntosh.

Tahir said Wierstad’s credit card would be used at a gas station within 30 minutes of the shooting. And prosecutors in Hennepin County have alleged that later that night, McIntosh participated in a burglary, a robbery and a shooting in Minneapolis that left a man dead. McIntosh is facing a second-degree murder charge in that case as well.

Tahir said one of the men with McIntosh, Isiah Lee Harper, 27, of Brooklyn Park, would testify to McIntosh’s involvement in the St. Paul burglary. DNA evidence would show McIntosh was at Wierstad’s home, and cellphone records would also place him in the location, Tahir said.

Tahir said cellphone records would also show McIntosh trying to sell a 9 mm gun two days after the shooting. He also used his phone to do a Google search for “woman killed St. Paul,” and then downloaded an online photo from a newspaper article about Wierstad, Tahir said.

Defense lawyer Christopher Zipko called Wierstad’s killing “horrible” and “senseless.” And he told a jury, “You will not like Mr. McIntosh.”

“You may think this person sitting next to me is one of the most horrible persons you’ve come across,” Zipko said.

But he said the prosecution lacks the evidence to show that McIntosh was present when Wierstad was killed. He said Harper and the other man in the case, Alvin Rudolph Bell Jr., a pair of longtime friends, are the only people who can testify who was in Wierstad’s home.

They are unreliable witnesses who have changed their stories multiple times, Zipko said.

McIntosh’s trial in Ramsey County is scheduled to continue this week. He is scheduled to be tried for the Minneapolis killing in January 2017.