HOLLIDAYSBURG — A Blair County jury has acquitted an Altoona man of illegal gun possession offenses after city police in December found a handgun under the seat of a vehicle in which he was a passenger.

Defense attorney Anthony Kattouf, on behalf of 36-year-old Joseph D’Agostino, told the jury that prosecutors didn’t provide evidence to connect D’Agostino to the gun.

“They haven’t presented enough evidence, not enough for a conviction,” Kattouf said in his closing argument.

Assistant District Attorney Nichole Smith disagreed as she asked the jury to consider that D’Agostino got into a vehicle on Dec. 21 with items in his hands and settled into the passenger seat.

“Where did police find the gun?” she asked the jury in her closing. “It was right under his seat, within easy reach.”

The jury took about 15 minutes to render not guilty verdicts for carrying a firearm without a license and possession of a prohibited firearm.

Kattouf acknowledged to the jury that D’Agostino is prohibited from possessing a weapon because of a prior conviction. But the defense attorney asked the jurors to consider that the gun belonged to someone other than D’Agostino.

Kattouf pointed out that police had no fingerprints or DNA evidence linking D’Agostino to the gun.

Smith asked the jury to consider that it was D’Agostino who became nervous when the vehicle’s driver was stopped for a traffic violation on Chestnut Avenue. And it was D’Agostino, Smith said, who attempted to flee from police when being frisked.

The driver, meanwhile, consented when police asked if they could search the vehicle, leading to the discovery of the .45-caliber semiautomatic handgun and a small safe with heroin, a variety of pills, some marijuana and $1,660 beneath the passenger seat.

Those items, Smith said, were found “in the exact place where someone getting into a car would put something.”

D’Agostino is expected to go on trial on drug-trafficking and related charges that Altoona police filed in connection with the Dec. 21 traffic stop. The pair of gun charges on which D’Agostino was tried Monday and Tuesday were separated from his other charges so they could be considered independently.

Mirror Staff Writer Kay Stephens is at 946-7456.