CORRECTION APPENDED

Lawyers grilled forensic experts yesterday as they examined the bloody clothing and photos of the corpse of an 18-year-old hotel cook killed by a former Harvard graduate student.

The examination of the evidence came in the third week of the retrial of Alexander Pring-Wilson, who is charged with manslaughter for stabbing Michael D. Colono to death outside of a Western Avenue pizzeria in 2003.

Assistant District Attorney Adrienne C. Lynch placed on prominent display for the jury the formerly white t-shirt worn by Colono the night he was killed.

Torn and wrinkled in several places, the shirt was half covered in blood, now brown from age.

John Soares, a chemist with a Massachusetts State Police crime lab, said that blood was also found on Colono’s jeans and that the cuts in his shirt were consistent with cuts left by a 4-inch blade found in Pring-Wilson’s Somerville apartment.

Under cross-examination by defense attorney E. Peter Parker, Soares said that during the search of Pring-Wilson’s apartment, items were moved and then replaced before they were photographed, a breach of protocol. Parker said that the aberration might jeopardize the authenticity of evidence found during the search, including the placement of the knife.

“With photographs we could have assessed whether the process of moving things had an effect on the location of the knife,” said Parker.

Faryl Sandler, a state medical examiner who performed the autopsy in 2003, described the different wounds sustained by Colono.

Using a white poster board with a black outline of a body, Sandler marked Colono’s five wounds, three of which she described as stab wounds and two of which that she said were relatively shallow.

Sandler testified that two of the stab wounds were located in the chest area while the other was sustained in the abdomen. She also said that one of the wounds on Colono’s arms could havebeen received in an act of self-defense.

Sandler told the jury that a wound near Colono’s right ventricle could have caused his death.

In the cross-examination, Parker deviated from the courtroom strategy of former defense attorney Rick Levinson. While Levinson focused on Colono’s large build, arguing that it presented a physical threat to Pring-Wilson, Parker asked a series of questions to establish the relative force for each wound, suggesting that the shallower wounds were caused by using less force than deeper wounds.

However, Sandler said that because she did not know how the assailants and victim were moving during the attack, she could not definitively determine the force used to inflict each wound.

“In a fluid situation where the assailant and victim are moving I can’t say that it was given with less force,” she said, referring to two of the wounds. “I don’t know if it’s because the victim retracted or not.”

—Staff writer Jamison A. Hill can be reached at jahill@fas.harvard.edu.
—Staff writer Laura A. Moore can be reached at lamoore@fas.harvard.edu.

CORRECTION

The headline for the Nov. 27 article "Evidence Debuts in Murder Trial" incorrectly stated that Alexander Pring-Wilson is on trial for murder. In fact, he is on trial for manslaughter.