They got kicked out of a Sweet Sixteen birthday party and wanted their $1 cover charge back, but when the father of the Baltimore birthday girl refused, they fatally shot him, a prosecutor said.
The two teens, Jamal Charles and Dwayne Drake, murdered Bryan Jones, 42, in front of his family on April 14, 2006, Rita Wisthoff-Ito, an assistant state?s attorney, said Thursday in opening arguments in the youths? murder trial.
Standing on the front porch of their North Augusta Avenue home, Drake, 17, urged Charles, 16, to show Jones “how we handle business,” Wisthoff-Ito said.
“After this case, you will see how coldly and senselessly a life can be taken,” Wisthoff-Ito told jurors in Baltimore City Circuit Court. “Bryan Jones will never wake up to see another sunrise again.”
Drake and Charles, being held at the Baltimore City Detention Center, face first-degree murder charges.
Charles? attorney, Margaret Mead, said her client did not have a gun that night and that he was leaving the party voluntarily. Searching for a “sense of closure,” she suggested, the Jones family members are conspiring to implicate Charles.
“They are all together, they go to the police station together, they hang out together,” Mead said. “Memories and versions of what they saw change.”
Drake?s attorney, Stephen Sacks, compared his client?s role to that of one of a group of kids encouraging one another to throw snowballs at cars. If a window gets damaged, Sacks said, the kid who threw the snowball is to blame ? not the others.
“You can?t predict what other people will do,” Sacks said.
