Citizen Crime Watch Blog

Witness killer gets life term
Victim was to testify about N.O. drug ring
Friday, June 06, 2008
By Susan Finch

A New Orleans man will spend the rest of his life in prison for killing a federal witness five years ago to keep her from testifying in a trial involving a large-scale cocaine trafficking ring, one of whose members ordered the hit and supplied the gun to carry it out.

U.S. District Judge Martin L.C. Feldman imposed the mandatory sentence on Donald “Big” Sylvester for his conviction by a jury last fall on charges of conspiring with Terrance “Breeze” Lash, 34, to distribute 5 kilograms of cocaine and, at Lash’s behest, murdering the witness, Demetra “Deedy Bird” Norse, on a street corner near her home with a .45-caliber handgun he got from Lash.

Prosecutors said Norse, who was in her 30s, was killed in retaliation for telling a federal grand jury and a law enforcement officer about Lash’s drug dealing, as well as to stop her from taking the stand in the federal trial of another of the drug conspirators.

Lash, already in federal prison after being convicted in 2006 on the same charges as Sylvester, was described by prosecutors as a “big-time drug dealer” who distributed 100- to 150-pound shipments of cocaine that another man brought from Houston every week.

U.S. Attorney Jim Letten said Norse was targeted after she made the mistake of telling “thugs” involved in the drug dealing that she had been called by the grand jury; such information is normally kept secret and federal witnesses are advised to be discreet, prosecutors said.

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Shooting victim was in car when musician was shot to death in ‘06
12:26 PM CDT on Friday, April 18, 2008

A man shot to death in a hail of bullets near the Irish Channel Thursday had recently testified in the trial of a man accused of killing Hot 8 Brass Band member Dinerral Shavers and was in the car when Shavers was killed, according to sources.

Sources said Thursday’s victim, 20-year-old Guy McEwan, was a friend of Shavers’ stepson. He testified in last week’s trial of David Bonds, who was accused of killing Shavers. Bonds was acquitted by a jury. The victim did not identify Bonds in testimony.

The shooting occurred near the corner of Peniston and Laurel around 5 p.m.

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Related:

Case bewilders a seasoned observer
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Gwen Filosa
The Times-Picayune

I don’t know why the first girl, the “key witness,” stood up and said she couldn’t identify the gunman she’d already told police about.

“I don’t see anybody,” said the teenage girl in a new dress, looking around the room without ever seeming to lock eyes on the barely 5-foot Bonds in the suit and tie. “I must need to go to the eye doctor.”

I also don’t know whether a juror saw Bonds make a threat while she testified. I only heard the man tell the judge that Bonds was “fidgeting” during the girl’s time on the stand, and that at one point he rested his clean-shaven face in his hand by pantomiming a handgun with his index finger and thumb.

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Bonds cleared in band leader’s killing
Teenage witness fails to ID him as shooter
Friday, April 11, 2008
By Gwen Filosa
The Times-Picayune

The word of three New Orleans girls in the witness box wasn’t enough to persuade a jury Thursday to hold David Bonds responsible for the 2006 killing of musician Dinerral Shavers.

After a four-day trial at Orleans Parish Criminal District Court — in which prosecutors had only the eyewitness testimony of three teenagers and a drug-dealing defendant covered in street tattoos — the jury returned an acquittal on all charges.

The decision means that no one will serve time for putting a .380-caliber bullet into the back of Shavers’ head. Bonds, known on the streets of the 6th Ward as “Head,” was the only suspect police linked to the killing.

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