Murder charge dropped in Wake

Witnesses wouldn't testify in court against a suspected Bloods member

RALEIGH -- A Wake County assistant district attorney on Monday dismissed a murder charge against a suspect prosecutors say is a Bloods gang member because witnesses wouldn't come to court.

It was the second time this month that a Wake County murder case has been dismissed because of uncooperative witnesses.

The difficulty in getting witnesses to testify in violent crime trials has long been a problem in courtrooms around the state and the country because of fears of retaliation, prosecutors and others in the legal community say.

At the Wake County Courthouse on Monday, family and friends of Shamonte Miguel Pair, 22, who died after a November 2006 shootout in Southeast Raleigh, expressed outrage at the decision to dismiss the murder charge against Eric Chambers, 23.

"Somebody gets to kill him and get away with it?," Erika McCalvin, Pair's sister, asked Wake Assistant District Attorney Jacquie Brewer outside the courtroom.

A frustrated Brewer later explained that the witnesses had actively dodged police for weeks, one witness even ran out of the back of a house when an officer tried to serve a subpoena that would have required a court appearance. Without witnesses, Brewer said, she wouldn't be able to prove her case.

"Everyone's afraid of retaliation," Brewer said. She has little protection to offer them, other than the ability to charge someone with a low-level felony intimidation charge if there is some type of backlash.

Brewer had planned to argue that Chambers is a member of the Bloods street gang and that Pair was shot because he may have strayed into Bloods territory when he went to a Malta Avenue house one night, she said.

Pair, who was not a known gang member, is survived by a son, Tonio, now 4, who is being raised by his mother.

Brewer said she had no choice but to drop the charge after witnesses evaded police for weeks and Superior Court Judge Carl Fox declined to delay the case. She had received an extension at a September trial when witnesses wouldn't come to court then.

"What's going to change, really?," Fox asked Brewer in court. "These witnesses are obviously not cooperating."

George Kelly, Chambers' attorney, said the evidence of the case was weak to begin with. He had planned to show jurors evidence that Chambers was at a friend's house the night of Pair's killing.

"He was not there," Kelly said. Kelly said his client admitted being a former member of the Bloods gang.

Hold witness in jail?

In another Wake County homicide case, charges were dismissed this month because prosecutors couldn't find witnesses to come to court. Miguel Goytortua, 22, had a first-degree murder charge dropped because a main witness wouldn't come to court to testify about the shooting death of a fruit-and-vegetable vendor at Watson's Flea Market. Gang ties were not suspected in that killing.

Stormy Ellis, a Durham County assistant district attorney who primarily prosecutes gang members, said she'll at times ask a judge to order a witness held in jail to ensure that he or she will come to court.

But not even that works all the time, and she has seen charges of robbery and assault, as well as murder, dismissed because witnesses don't want to point fingers at suspected gang members in their community.

"If we don't have those witnesses that will come in and testify in gang-related instances, we're going to lose this war," Ellis said.

Ellis will speak at an anti-gang training conference tomorrow in Chapel Hill, held by Project Safe Neighborhoods.

Those who intimidate witnesses can be charged with a felony, but court data show that those charges rarely result in convictions. In the past five years, 2,034 people have been charged with witness intimidation statewide, but only 286 people, or 14 percent, have been convicted in that time.