Murder trial witness recants

Dickson, 21, had testified five times in recent years that she was with the men believed to have gunned down 18-year-old honors student Cedirick Steele. But on Thursday she recanted that statement in court.

After that change in her story, prosecutors granted Dickson immunity, hoping to get her to go back to her original testimony. Prosecutors believe that she was with Antwan Carter and Daniel Pinckney Jr. when, prosecutors charge, they shot and killed Steele.

“There was the possibility that if she didn’t return to the witness stand, that all her [previous] testimony would be thrown out,” said Jake Wark, spokesman for Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley, in explaining why Dickson was granted immunity. “We were hoping that when she took the witness stand, that she would tell the truth.”

But yesterday, Dickson picked up where she had left off Thursday, testifying that she was not with the defendants. She gave mostly one-word answers to a series of questions by Assistant District Attorney Paul Treseler and the defendants’ lawyers.

Carter and Pinckney, both 21 and from the South End, are charged with first-degree murder.

A trial last year, in which Dickson testified that she was with them on March 14, 2007, as they plotted and carried out a shooting, ended with a deadlocked jury. Dickson also testified before a grand jury in 2007 that she was with the two men.

Yesterday, Treseler asked Dickson if she remembered repeatedly giving detailed testimony placing her in Pickney’s car as the two men made arrangements to retaliate against a group of gang rivals. She replied yes.

But later Pinckney’s attorney, James Greenberg, asked her, “You were never in a car that day with these two defendants, were you?” She answered no.

During last year’s trial, Dickson told jurors that she overheard Carter and Pinckney, her former boyfriend, talk about retaliating against gang rivals. She said she was in a vehicle with the defendants when Steele, an honors student at Bunker Hill Community College, was shot. Steele had been waiting at a bus stop near Centre Street and Highland Avenue in Roxbury, across from the Timilty Middle School, when bullets started flying.

Prosecutors say Steele was killed because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Pinckney and Carter were allegedly driving in the Highland Avenue area when they saw a group they believed to be rivals who had fired gunshots at Pinckney earlier that day.

Prosecutors said Pinckney gave Carter a gun and instructed him to leave the car and open fire. The bullets missed the intended targets and hit Steele, who happened to be in the same area. He was shot seven times.

During the last trial, Dickson said she did not see Carter fire any shots, but witnessed him leave Pinckney’s car wearing a green hoodie, toting a silver handgun, and wearing her black gloves. She said that minutes after he left, she heard gunfire and then saw Carter run back to the car, throwing off the hoodie before he entered.

Dickson previously testified that Carter was agitated and nudged her with the handgun as if to get her to take the weapon. She said she refused and asked Pinckney to drop her off at her mother’s house.

Dickson initially told Boston police that she and Pinckney were at his mother’s house in Webster at the time of the shooting; but after she was subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury, she told grand jurors that she was in Pinckney’s car with him and Carter.

After Dickson’s testimony yesterday, Treseler played six recordings of telephone conversations between Carter and several associates while he was incarcerated in summer 2007 on an unrelated offense. Prosecutors allege that Carter urged his associates to kill Dickson, saying that “we need to make her history” and that “if she’s alive, I’m doing life.”

After testimony ended for the day, Steele’s grandmother, Mahlia Martin, sat outside the courtroom and said: “Our family has been going through a lot, waiting for closure on all this. I think she [Dickson] has been through a lot, too. She’s afraid, she’s young and under a lot of pressure.”