A Circuit Court judge granted Baltimore prosecutors two more months yesterday to try to shore up a first-degree murder case complicated by witness problems - including a police officer who gave colleagues two differing statements about what he saw.
The trial of Keko O. Worrell, 22, was scheduled to begin yesterday. Instead, prosecutor Gerald Volatile asked the judge for a postponement. He explained his reasons for the request in discouraging detail:
He started with six witnesses, he told the court. Two, including Officer Gary Lewis, are ready to appear at trial. Of the other four, one was killed. The best remaining eyewitness to the shooting failed to show up yesterday. Another has said he is too scared to testify. And a warrant is out for the arrest of the final witness, who is implicated in a separate shooting.
For those who know the frustrations of bringing a murder case to trial in Baltimore, such witness problems are unsurprising. Yesterday marked the second postponement of Worrell's case - for exactly the same reasons.
"I've never had a case where witnesses weren't afraid," said Volatile. "It's inherent if there are witnesses in a homicide."
After a man who said he saw Worrell shoot Michael Lockett was killed in January, another witness backed out.
"The quote from him was, `One witness is already dead. I'm not going to be next,'" Volatile said. Investigators have not determined whether that killing was connected to the Worrell case, but Lockett's family members are convinced it was not, because the teen-ager charged in that killing was a friend of Lockett's.
Worrell, of the 1300 block of N. Caroline St., is accused of killing Lockett, 16, the evening of Aug. 14 last year. Police found Lockett's body, shot three times in the back, in the parking lot in the 1200 block of Lindenleaf Court in East Baltimore.
Lockett's mother, Pamela Bowie, said yesterday that a feud between the two had been festering for many months. Like so many in the city, the fatal argument was about rival allegiances: Lockett was friends with someone who had done something bad to one of Worrell's friends, she said, "so he retaliated against my son."
Lewis, who was off duty at the time of the shooting, initially told detectives he had been inside his mother's house two blocks away when he heard the shots that killed Lockett.
He did not call 911 and did not investigate the shooting, in part because he didn't have his police-issued gun with him - a breach of Police Department rules.
