During the course of the trial, which is expected to last several weeks, the 14-member panel will hear from experts and detectives.
Exterior view of the new Mercer County Criminal Courthouse in Trenton on South Warren St, in Trenton, New Jersey. TRENTON — A prosecutor set the scene for the jury yesterday in the trial of Keith Williams, a city man charged with planning the 2008 murder of Arrell Bell on a social networking website.
Assistant Prosecutor John Carbonara said that the jury would learn, from the people who would testify, that Williams and his gangster friends plotted to kill Bell because they thought he had betrayed another gang member to police.
During the course of the trial, which is expected to last several weeks, the 14-member panel will hear from experts and detectives. Williams’ own taped confession will be a prominent part of the evidence, Carbonara said.
“A video statement was given to police,” Carbonara said. “And the defendant has a lot to say in it.”
In the hours-long statement, Williams admitted that he and fellow gang members discussed “what to do” with Bell.
“You are going to hear that he was going to kill Arrell Bell,” Carbonara said.
Williams and three other gang members — Karim Sampson, John Murphy and Brandon Edwards — are charged with conspiracy to murder Bell. The others are scheduled to be tried separately later this year.
Bell was found dead in Stacey Park with two gunshot wounds to the back of his head.
Carbonara said the state is not alleging that Williams killed Bell, but only that he planned with others to kill him.
“I ask that you keep in mind that this is not a murder case,” he said. “You aren’t going to see the weapon. It was never recovered. You are not going to hear who pulled the trigger.”
Williams’ attorney Mark Fury said that because detectives don’t know who actually killed Bell, they made up this story about how Williams, Sampson, Murphy and Edwards planned his murder on MySpace.
There is no “smoking gun,” Fury said. He said the prosecution’s case is fiction. “To do their job they came up with their own version of how Arrell Bell died.”
Carbonara said the jury will also see the text of those MySpace messages that the men sent in the weeks leading up to Bell’s death.
Because the messages weren’t public, the detectives obtained a communications warrant from MySpace to get access to them.
“They don’t show up on your MySpace page ... but they go through a server,” Carbonara said. “They cannot be deleted, they cannot be altered, they cannot be changed.”
But Fury said it is impossible to say that it was his client who was actually the one sitting behind the computer writing those messages.
“They have to prove that Williams made these statements,” he said.
The jurors will begin to see those messages in the coming days as investigators and representatives from MySpace and Verizon are called to the witness stand.
Yesterday, Gilbert Bell, the father of the victim, testified saying he had met Sampson before and knew him as a friend of his son.
Bell describes his son as an ambitious man who often traveled up to New York City to pursue his dream to become a rap artist. Bell said on the weekend he died, his son was supposed to make a trip to perform at a talent show where producers would hear his music.
Contact Jenna Pizzi at jpizzi@njtimes.com or (609) 989-5717.
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