BODY:
This September, the late Chante Wright will speak from the grave and reportedly identify Hakeem Bey as the killer of her friend who was celebrating a rapper's new record deal in 2000.
Yesterday, in the third day of a pretrial
hearing, Common Pleas Judge Renee Caldwell Hughes ruled that Wright's earlier testimony - before a grand jury, at a preliminary
hearing and her statement to police - could be used in the trial of Bey, 26, for the fatal shooting of Moses Williams, 23, in South Philadelphia. The trial is slated to start Sept. 15.
Hughes said that she based her decision on a rarely used
federal legal rule that prevents a defendant from benefiting from "wrongful conduct" - the murder of a witness - if the Commonwealth can prove a link between the defendant and the murder victim.
The judge said that she found an "unequivocal link" between Bey, the killer, and a middleman through their numerous calls to each other shortly before and after the Jan. 19 murder of Wright, a once-protected witness who was set to testify against Bey in the Williams murder.
"I realize the law allows it," said Bey's defense attorney Joseph Santaguida. "But all they had was phone contact between the parties. It doesn't prove that my client had anything to do with the murder."
Earlier, Laquaille Bryant, 26, of the Fern Rock section, admitted to homicide detectives that he fatally shot Wright, 23, and her friend, Octavia "Tay" Green, 23, but would not admit any connection to Bey. His confession was read into the court record.
Wright - the first state witness to enter the federal witness protection program - returned to Philadelphia, despite warnings, to see her dying grandmother, who had raised her.
Only eight months earlier, she and her 4-year-old son had been admitted to the federal program because authorities knew about the contract on her life regarding her upcoming testimony against Bey.
She had agreed to testify to help her then-boyfriend in a drug case. Wright and her son were relocated to Jacksonville, Fla., but she continued to call people in Philadelphia and was dropped from the federal program.
In a color-coded chart of cell-phone records, Assistant District Attorney Brian Zarallo yesterday showed that at 11:18 p.m. on Jan. 18 - about 2 1/2 hours before the double murder - Bryant spoke to middleman Malik "Turtle" Bennett, before Bryant spoke with Wright on her cell.
Twenty-five minutes later, at 11:43 p.m., Bennett spoke for the first time to Bey on a smuggled cell phone that was later seized from his cell at Curran Fromhold Correctional Center, Zarallo said. Immediately afterwards, Bennett called Bryant again.
At 2:04 a.m., Bryant, sitting in the rear of Wright's rental car, fatally shot Wright and Green on Patton Street near Tasker, Zarallo said.
Two minutes later, Bryant had a four-second talk with Bennett, followed minutes later by a 90-second chat between the two, said Zarallo.
Nine hours after the murders, Bey, from his jail cell, and the killer talked in a three-second call, he added. This was followed by several conversations between Bey and Bennett, starting about 11 a.m. and continuing into the afternoon of Jan. 19, the prosecutor said.
Zarallo argued that not only does the Commonwealth have cell-phone records, but also Bryant's confession and a witness who overheard a conversation between the admitted killer and middleman about money.
The witness, whose name is being withheld for safety reasons, earlier testified about overhearing Bryant tell Bennett: "I gotta get paid." The witness heard a figure of "$10,000," Zarallo said.
In 2000, Wright, then 15, and four friends were in a car celebrating a neighborhood rapper's record deal.
Wright testified earlier that she was sitting in the rear when she saw Bey fire multiple times, missing his intended target and then fatally shooting Williams in the front passenger seat as the car turned from S. 23rd Street onto Titan Street in South Philadelphia. *
