Mother paints vastly different portrait of accused killer in Mattapan massacre case

By Brian Ballou, Globe Staff

As a jury started deliberating Dwayne Moore’s fate this afternoon, the defendant’s mother painted a dramatically different image of the accused killer than the one given by prosecutors during the five-week trial.

Just moments after briefly speaking with her son as he was being led out of Suffolk Superior Court, Diann Moore said her son wanted desperately to talk with the family of Simba Martin, one of four people Moore is charged with massacring in cold blood on Sept. 28, 2010.

Moore has called Martin a friend in taped interviews with police, and he wants to express his condolences to Martin’s family and assure them he had nothing to do with the killings, Diann Moore said in an interview outside the courtroom, moments after Judge Jeffrey Locke ended his two-hour jury instructions and the jurors were handed the case to begin deliberating.

“My son told me his heart sank when they played the video from the autopsies during the trial,” Moore said. “He couldn’t bear to look at the screen, seeing that child and the other victims and his friend Simba.”

Moore said she visited her son in jail Tuesday night and they prayed. She said she is optimistic her son will be acquitted and believes that his attorney, John Amabile, presented a stronger defense in the retrial.

“I know my son is innocent, so now I just pray that the truth will come out,” she said.

“The prosecutor is causing a lot of pain for the victim’s family.”

Prosecutor Edmond Zabin described Moore during the trial as a cold-blooded killer, a man who admitted to an associate shortly after the quadruple murder that he had shot not only three adults but a 2-year-old who was being held in his mother’s arms.

Moore, 35, is charged with killing Martin, 21; his girlfriend, Eyanna Flonory; her 2-year-old son, Amanihotep Smith; and Levaughn Washum-Garrison, Martin’s friend who slept on a couch at Martin’s Sutton Street house that night.

A fifth man, Marcus Hurd, who came to the house that night to buy marijuana from Martin, was shot in the back of the head but survived.

Diann Moore said her son was working at Pine Street Inn training to become a cook, and the day he was arrested he was slated to start a job as a youth worker.

“He had been focusing on doing those things, and that’s not the description of a criminal,” Moore said.

“He was on that right path, versus an individual who lives by crime, who robs and uses females,” Moore said, referring to Kimani Washington, who has admitted to going to Sutton Street to rob Martin but said he left prior to the homicides.

Washington accepted a plea agreement with prosecutors to avoid more prison time and testified on behalf of the prosecution in both trials. A jury deadlocked on the charges against Moore in the first trial that ended in March. A co-defendant, Edward Washington, Kimani Washington’s cousin, was acquitted in that trial on murder charges.

Amabile claimed in his closing arguments Tuesday that Kimani Washington was the person who committed the murders.

In the first trial, jurors deliberated for seven days. This jury was picked from Worcester County residents, after Amabile successfully argued that the publicity following the shootings and the first trial would prevent his client from getting an impartial jury locally.