By threatening a witness on the stand in the middle of his murder trial, Lance Walker rattled the very people now deciding his guilt or innocence.
On the 10th day of the 17-day trial, as the lawyers huddled at the bench with their backs turned, the jury watched the 29-year-old defendant lock eyes with the witness, hold up a legal document with one hand, pump a thumbs-down gesture with the other and warn, "I know your name. You're going down. You're going down."
Fear instantly gripped the face of the witness, who muttered in disbelief, and within earshot of jurors, "Did he just threaten me?"
Later, during a lunch break in the jury room, the forewoman sensed apprehension. She took a brief poll of the all-female panel and then passed a note to Baltimore Circuit Judge John Carroll Byrnes. The jurors were afraid, too, the forewoman wrote. What was being done to ensure their safety?
More than they knew.
On the first day of the trial, federal authorities had arrested dozens of Walker's associates in the Black Guerrilla Family prison-based gang. Federal agents, who were monitoring prisoners' communications and smuggled cell phones, had overheard Walker recruiting BGF members to attend his trial at the Mitchell Courthouse on Calvert Street and intimidate witnesses and jurors from the gallery.
Even after the roundup, Baltimore police stationed a homicide detective in the courtroom to monitor spectators.
But the jurors did not know that. They didn't know about the roundup or the wiretaps or even that Walker was a BGF member who had been given a 40-year federal sentence for possession of a handgun and more than $15,000 worth of cocaine, crack and heroin.
They did know, however, that Walker and his wife, Nadirah Moreno, were accused of carrying out an elaborate murder plot against a New York-based Jamaican drug dealer, who had fronted the Perry Hall couple $48,000 worth of marijuana in 2007, which they either couldn't or wouldn't repay.
Prosecutor Theresa Shaffer argued that Moreno lured the victim, Marlon Beckford, 31, from the Bronx to Baltimore, telling him that she had the money. When Beckford arrived, Moreno told him that Walker had been arrested for drugs.
With Beckford, his infant godson and the child's mother in the car in the early morning hours of Oct. 30, 2007, Moreno led the group to a secluded area in front of the Ravenwood apartments in the 5800 block of Edgepark Road, near the Mount Pleasant Golf Course.
