Class divisions evident in fatal stabbing case

Much of what happened on the rainy, early morning of April 12, 2003, when Alexander Pring-Wilson encountered Michael Colono outside a Cambridge pizzeria is in dispute. But at least three things are certain: They came from vastly different worlds. They met purely by chance. And it proved fatal for Colono.

Pring-Wilson, a 25-year-old Harvard graduate student from an affluent family in Colorado Springs, was walking home after a night of drinking and listening to reggae when he passed the pizzeria. Colono, an 18-year-old high school dropout who worked as a cook, was sitting in a car waiting for a pizza. The two exchanged words and scuffled. Then Pring-Wilson took out a pocketknife and repeatedly stabbed Colono.

Seventeen months later, the issue of whether Pring-Wilson started the fight and deliberately killed Colono, or stabbed him in a desperate act of self-defense, is expected to be the focus of his first-degree murder trial beginning tomorrow in Middlesex Superior Court.

The case has stoked class tensions in a community of great poverty and great wealth; Cambridge reserves 17 percent of its housing stock for government-subsidized, low-income residents, but it also boasts the highest concentration of million-dollar homes of any large city in the nation.

Given the strikingly different backgrounds of the two protagonists, some have described the case as a deadly clash between town and gown.

The son of a defense lawyer and a former Colorado prosecutor, Pring-Wilson speaks five languages, was pursuing a master's degree in Russian and Eurasian studies, and planned to go to law school. Colono, whose father is a factory worker and mother a homemaker, had fathered a 3-year-old daughter and was on probation for a 2001 conviction for selling crack cocaine. But relatives said he was putting his life back on track.

''There's such a clear class distinction," said Glenn Koocher, 55, a lifelong Cambridge resident, former school committee member, and onetime host of a local television talk show. ''This is a kid [Pring-Wilson] who has economic advantages and resources and is alleged to have done something really out of character, and that's why people are so interested and so perplexed."

How the men's starkly different backgrounds will resonate with a jury is hard to predict, said legal specialists.

''Because it isn't clear how the verbal fight led to the knifing, where jurors are in society is going to influence how they hear the evidence," said Jeffrey B. Abramson, a visiting professor of government at Harvard, a former Middlesex County prosecutor, and author of ''We, the Jury: The Jury System and the Ideal of Democracy." ''You can imagine Pring-Wilson's defense being that Harvard graduate students just aren't murderers . . . and there has to be a reason" that he stabbed Colono, he said.

But the class differences could also hurt Pring-Wilson, other legal specialists said.

''There may be some resentment from jurors who think this fellow is privileged and has some sort of elite status" and that he ''feels he's a special person and should be treated as such," said Robert J. Zanello, a veteran criminal defense lawyer.

The overriding question, several veteran criminal lawyers agreed, is whether the jury will accept Pring-Wilson's argument that he had no choice but to use deadly force to defend himself in a street fight.

The killing occurred about 1:45 a.m. near Pizza Ring, a modest pizzeria with metal bars on the windows on Western Avenue not far from Central Square.

At a bail hearing shortly after the stabbing, Middlesex Assistant District Attorney Adrienne C. Lynch said Colono, his cousin Samuel Rodriguez, and his cousin's girlfriend were sitting in a car when they noticed an intoxicated Pring-Wilson walking by.

Colono mentioned to his companions that Pring-Wilson was so drunk he was staggering, a remark Lynch said Pring-Wilson overheard. The defendant, she said, then approached the car and, after some angry words, opened the back door.

Colono stepped out, and a fight ensued, she said. Pring-Wilson, a rugby player and former high school football captain who apparently outweighed Colono by about 30 pounds, stabbed him five times in the chest, including once in the heart, with his 3-inch pocketknife, she said. Colono's companions drove Colono away. He died after they got lost on the way to the hospital.

Pring-Wilson dialed 911 on his cellphone and reported that he had just witnessed a fight but had not been involved, Lynch said.

Pring-Wilson, she said, told the operator, ''I just saw it happen. I'm just a [expletive] bystander." He then called a friend with whom he had gone to the reggae concert in Cambridge and left a message saying, ''I got attacked by a group. Um, I fended them off. I stabbed them a couple of times and, um, don't repeat this to the police," according to Lynch.

Pring-Wilson later told investigators that he jumped into an ongoing fight and tried to stop it, Lynch said.

Pring-Wilson's attorney at the time, Jeffrey A. Denner, gave a different account at his client's arraignment. Pring-Wilson, he said, fought only after Colono and his cousin taunted him, then got out of the car and started to beat him. Pring-Wilson could not run away because he was wearing flip-flops and was in a daze because of the pummeling and the effects of alcohol.

Pring-Wilson has since replaced Denner with another Boston lawyer, E. Peter Parker, and two Colorado lawyers.

A judge initially ordered Pring-Wilson held without bail, telling an emotionally charged courtroom filled with supporters of both men that Pring-Wilson's exemplary academic record did not outweigh evidence that he initially lied to authorities about the stabbing.

But a month later, another judge allowed Pring-Wilson to be freed after posting $400,000 cash bond. Colono's brother, Marcos, called the bail decision ''a smack in the face" and said class appeared to be a factor.

Last week, supporters of Pring-Wilson and Colono voiced profound sadness about the fatal fight and rallied to each man's defense. John Riker, a professor of philosophy at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, where Pring-Wilson majored in classics, described ''Xander" -- Pring-Wilson's nickname -- as highly intelligent and one of his favorite students in 37 years as a teacher.

''His presence in the classroom just made things sparkle in a way that, when he was absent for a day, it wasn't the same class," Riker said. ''A lot of intellectually brilliant students are intimidating to other students. . . . But when Xander talked, he was really intelligent, but he wasn't intimidating, so the other students would just join the conversation."

Riker said he was shocked by the slaying. ''There's no doubt that Xander had an aggressive side. He played rugby, so I knew that," he said. ''He struck me as a guy who would stand up for himself. [But] he showed no signs of overt aggression. He wouldn't start something."

Bob Crowder, who was Pring-Wilson's choir teacher at Palmer High School in Colorado Springs and gave him private piano lessons, remembered him as an enthusiastic student with a fine bass voice and fingers that could not catch up with his nimble mind at the keyboard. Pring-Wilson was a big, physical kid, said Crowder, who recalled how the teenager once inadvertently put a hole in the wall of his music class while dancing exuberantly to Carl Orff's classical piece ''Carmina Burana." Pring-Wilson promptly agreed to pay for repairs.

Several other friends of Pring-Wilson, including Harvard officials and fellow students, declined to comment, saying they had been subpoenaed to testify or had been urged by Pring-Wilson not to speak with reporters.

Colono's supporters include Linda Fobes, who taught him in the first and second grade at Graham and Parks Alternative Public School in Cambridge and mentored him through the eighth grade. She said he was a bright young man with an infectious smile who enjoyed drawing.

She alluded to occasional disciplinary problems. ''As all middle-school kids do, they go through that phase where they test the waters, and Michael was typical," she said. ''But what was nice about Michael was that all the teachers really liked him and were rooting for him. You could say, 'Michael, knock it off.' And then he'd give you that little smile, and he'd come around."

Colono dropped out of Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School at 15, around the time he became a father. Fobes ran into him on the street later, she said, and he told her he was working to support his daughter and hoped to eventually go back to school.

When Fobes learned of his death, she said, she was ''crushed, absolutely crushed."

''It was just so sad and such a waste," she said, ''because he was a kid that was pulling his life together, and then it's gone."

Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at jsaltzman@globe.com.