Woman tells of events leading to bridge slaying

Io Nachtwey seemed like a typical younger sister: less sophisticated than the other women, eager to please, and happy to just belong, a Harvard Square street gang member testified yesterday.

Ana White said that when a group of female gang initiates went to White's mother's house in Milton on Nov. 1, 2001, the 22-year-old Nachtwey seemed to enjoy the ''girl talk," sharing a meal and borrowing White's clothes.

''She was like a little girl, like a little sister that wanted to be grown up," said White, smiling slightly. Her matter-of-fact tone gave no hint of what prosecutors say was her own participation in the brutal murder of Nachtwey just 48 hours after the Milton gathering.

White testifed as the trial of four men charged with Natchwey's slaying entered a crucial phase yesterday. The 21-year-old, who has admitted to covering Natchwey's mouth to quiet her as she was stabbed and beaten to death on a railroad bridge over the Charles River, cut a deal last year with Suffolk County prosecutors to testify in return for a 12-year prison sentence.

Her testimony, along with that of fellow gang member Lauren Alleyne, is expected to be the most gripping of the trial, as well as pivotal to the prosecution's case. White's former boyfriend and the gang's alleged chief recruiter, 27-year-old Ismael Valdez of Lawrence, is on trial, accused of ordering Nachtwey's murder, as are his 22-year-old brother, Luis Valdez, and 31-year-old Harold Parker of Mattapan.

Scott Davenport, a 31-year-old Cambridge man, is charged with fatally stabbing Natchwey with a 10-inch knife, and Luis Valdez is accused of finishing the crime by smashing Nachtwey's head with nunchuks, a martial arts weapon.

White, a petite woman with short black hair and large brown eyes, took the witness stand late yesterday afternoon and told the Suffolk Superior Court jury how she came to meet Valdez and Nachtwey in Harvard Square and joined the gang during a few whirlwind days in late 2001. She is expected to describe Nachtwey's murder on Monday, when the trial resumes.

White said her first contact with the gang was when she rode with her mother to Arlington, where her mother worked, and then took a bus to Harvard Square to just ''hang out" on the day before Halloween. A 10th-grade dropout who was then just two days shy of her 18th birthday, White, who was born in El Salvador and came to the United States when she was adopted, said her mother had long since stopped ''pushing the issue of going back to school."

It was in Harvard Square that she met Ismael Valdez through a mutual friend, she said, and he invited her to smoke a blunt, an inexpensive cigar hollowed out and filled with marijuana.

He called himself Flaco and said he was from New York and was in Cambridge to organize a gang. She used a false name, Christina. He said she was cute and gave her the nickname Shorty, White testified.

They agreed to meet the next day at The Pit, a sunken brick plaza near the Harvard Square Red Line subway station.

They met on Halloween, along with other young people, including Nachtwey, who seemed eager to join the gang. White described the denizens of the Pit as ''mostly runaways, drug users, anybody looking for something to fit in with."

Members of the prospective gang met in a Cambridge cemetery, where Ismael Valdez told them that he was organizing a new chapter of the Crips, a notorious street gang with a national reputation.

''He said it was going to be like a family," she said. ''Most people in The Pit really don't have families."

The next night, they had a party at a motel in Braintree, where the new gang members swore their loyalty, drank, and ''threw their C's," flashing the Crips sign of fingers held in the shape of the letter C. Some of the women were paired off with the men, including White with Ismael Valdez, as ''kings and queens."

But the good feelings, she said, didn't last. Later that night, the recruits were told that the gang ''wasn't all fun and games" and that they would be expected to go out and steal for the gang.

Punishment for disobedience, she said they were told, would be a 30-second beating for the first offense, a 1-minute beating for the second offense, and death for the third. If they tried to run, the gang leaders said, a person close to them would be hurt.

The gang's discipline lasted just two nights, she said. The first night, members armed with knives and BB guns tried to rob people using ATMs near Harvard Square. But on the second -- when White and Natchwey had stayed behind at the Braintree motel to do the gang's laundry -- the new recruits failed to come back.

The next morning, Nov. 3, a breathless Alleyne returned to the motel to report that Nachtwey's boyfriend, Gene Bamford, had stirred the new recruits into open revolt. Bamford was questioning whether the alleged gang leaders really belonged to the Crips.

The Valdez brothers and Parker were furious, White said, practically throwing tantrums ''like little boys" over the challenge to their authority. Vowing revenge, the three men set out with the three women in tow, White said. She said she and Alleyne, but not Nachtwey, were reassured that they wouldn't be harmed.

''He [Ismael Valdez] told me 'Baby girl, you're going to be OK,' " she said, as the trial ended for the day.

Ralph Ranalli can be reached at ranalli@globe.com.