Teen pleads not guilty to shooting friend

By John R. Ellement, Globe Staff

A Boston teenager with no prior criminal record pleaded not guilty to manslaughter charges today after he allegedly shot his friend in the face while waving a handgun around a Dorchester apartment, police and prosecutors said.

Prosecutors said Rashard Monroe shot Kendell Floyd in a second-floor apartment on Wainwright Street in Dorchester. The shooting took place Monday around 2:30 p.m., police said. Floyd turned 17 last week and Monroe will turn 18 in April.

Relatives of both teens, who lived around the corner from each other, were in court today, but declined to comment.

At Monroe's arraignment in Dorchester Municipal Court, Suffolk Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Hickman said Monroe, Floyd, and two others boys, ages 14 and 15, were smoking marijuana. At some point, Monroe pulled out a handgun, Hickman said.

“He was waving the handgun around and it went off in the face,’’ of Floyd, she said in court. Hickman said Floyd was shot in the eye. He was rushed to Boston Medical Center where he was pronounced dead, police said.

According to Hickman and a Boston police report filed in court, Monroe fled the scene after the shooting, but later acknowledged in a tape-recorded statement to police that he shot his friend.

Monroe has no prior criminal record, said his lawyer, Shira Diner. “He has never spent a night in jail,’’ she said in court.

Judge James Coffey set bail at $250,000 cash. Monroe is due back in court March 12. In addition to being charged with manslaughter, which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years imprisonment, Monroe is charged with unlawful possession of ammunition.

Monroe was a student at the Dorchester Educational Complex, the former Dorchester High School that now serves as home for a variety of academic disciplines, his lawyer said. Jonathan Palumbo, spokesman for the Boston public schools, said Floyd had stopped attending school last November.

The shooting occurred the same day a Jamaica Plain man was sentenced to five years in the Suffolk County House of Correction for fatally shooting an acquaintance while playing with a gun inside a Jamaica Plain apartment in April 2007. Relatives of the victim, Cheyenne Baez, contended the shooter, Enrique Baez, should have received a longer sentence.

In a statement, Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley called Floyd's death an "appalling tragedy.''

“There's simply no reason a teenager should have access to an unregistered firearm, no matter what his or her intentions may be,” Conley said. “Kendell’s death at the hands of a friend is monumentally frustrating as well. We have to deglamorize guns and gun violence if we’re to prevent more tragic incidents like this one.”

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