Slain child’s final moments recounted

“I told her to just zip it,’’ Jobe, 43, said yesterday in court. “I told her I’d give her one dollar to stop for one minute.’’ For a couple of seconds, the ploy worked, but then the fifth-grader began making weird noises. The two stared at each other and broke out in laughter.

That was the last playful moment of Persad’s life. Minutes later, she would be lying on her back in a pool of blood, her cheerful face shattered by a shotgun blast on a warm summer evening in 2002. “Trina, I know you can hear me,’’ Jobe said to the girl as she gasped for air, “if you can hear me, answer.’’ Persad did not respond.

In her testimony yesterday afternoon, on the second day of Joseph Cousin’s murder trial in Suffolk Superior Court, Jobe recounted without pause what happened on that bench. But then she burst into tears after saying she heard what sounded like a firecracker. Jobe placed her hands over her face, slowly drew them to her lap, and took several deep breaths.

For about two minutes she was silent as she tried to compose herself. Judge Nancy Holtz called a brief recess.

When testimony resumed, Jobe recalled attempting to shield Trina’s 6-year-old sister and 3-year-old brother with her own body after the shooting, fearing that more shots would be fired. “I told them to close their eyes and lay on the ground. . . . I told them that if they were scared to shake their heads, and they both did.’’

Her testimony captivated the jury of nine women and five men, who were solemn and motionless.

Jobe grew up with Persad’s mother, Bernadette Fernandez, in Trinidad and baby-sat her children while Fernandez and her husband worked the night shift.

Jobe said she had never been to Goffigan Park before June 29, 2002. But on that day she decided to take the three children out to enjoy the spectacular weather. Soon after arriving, Jobe said, she sensed tension between a group of about 16 young males at the park’s basketball court and the occupants of a gray Honda Civic that had pulled up nearby. Words were exchanged and the car left.

But moments later, the car returned, and Jobe said that was when she knew she had to get the children out of the park.

“I told them, let’s get out of here.’’ Trina was several paces behind Jobe, who had grabbed the younger children by the hand, when the blast rang out.

Josh Wall, assistant Suffolk district attorney, said in his opening statement Tuesday that Cousin, now 25, fired the shot from a sawed-off shotgun while in the back seat of the car. His intended victims were members of the Big Head Boyz gang, Wall said. Prosecutors said Cousin, a member of the M.I.C. gang, acted in retaliation after nearly being shot by gang rivals the previous night.

Cousin’s lawyer, William White, said in his opening statement that Cousin’s whereabouts on the day of the shooting can be accounted for and did not include Goffigan Park.

The trial is expected to last about three weeks. A trial in 2004 ended in a mistrial after prosecutors discovered that several jurors had lied about their criminal history on their questionnaires.