Nicholas Dudley Pinderhughes Weaver's resume lists his schooling at Baltimore's Mount St. Joseph High School, work done with HIV-infected children in Africa and the steps he has taken toward a career in the law. He was an Eagle Scout, an acolyte at his church and, most recently, a student at a private university in New York.
But Weaver, 22, was pulled Thursday from a science class at Adelphi University and arrested in the fatal shooting of a teenager on a Woodlawn street nearly six years ago.
Former Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke, a family friend, said he was stunned by the news.
"I've watched him grow up in the neighborhood," Schmoke, who lives on the same block as the Weavers in the Ashburton area of northwest Baltimore, said yesterday. "I hope that it gets resolved in his favor because I've always thought of him as a positive force in the community and a young man with a promising future."
Weaver - the grandson of the late Alice G. Pinderhughes, who was the first female superintendent of Baltimore City schools - was being held yesterday without bail in New York while awaiting extradition proceedings.
His attorney, Paul Testaverde of Queens, N.Y., said that his client is innocent and is scheduled to appear in court Tuesday in Long Island to contest extradition to Maryland.
"I think the police have either received bad evidence or there's a mistake here," the defense attorney said.
Weaver was one of two young men arrested in the death of David L. Baskin Jr., an aspiring rap musician who was shot in July 2002 near his Woodlawn home, just a day after his 18th birthday. Baskin's mother said yesterday that police told her he was the inadvertent victim of a group of West Baltimore boys who were feuding with a group from Woodlawn over a girl.
The other man, Charles Howard Davis, 21, was arrested Thursday at his home in the 2100 block of Maryland Ave. in Baltimore and charged with first-degree murder, police said.
Both Weaver, the accused shooter, and Davis were 16 at the time of the killing, police said.
Brenda G. Baskin, the victim's mother, said investigators have told her that her son was not the intended target of the bullets fired in the Heraldry Square neighborhood of Woodlawn shortly before midnight on July 3, 2002.
Rather, she said, her son was friends with the intended victim, who had given her son a hat like his as a birthday gift.
David Baskin was wearing that blue hat when he was killed.
