Pring-Wilson gets 2 years in plea bargain for stabbing
By Marie Szaniszlo | Saturday, January 12, 2008 |
http://www.bostonherald.com | Local Coverage
Nearly five years after he stabbed an 18-year-old father to death on a Cambridge street, a former Harvard graduate student yesterday changed his plea to guilty and was sentenced to two years in prison.
A plea bargain will allow Alexander Pring-Wilson to avoid a third trial and go free in 14 months, having already served 290 days in connection with the killing of Michael Colono.
“Today, we engaged in a balance of assurances and uncertainties,” Middlesex District Attorney Gerry Leone said after yesterday’s hearing. “The assurances far outweighed the uncertainties.. . He has admitted his guilt.”
Pring-Wilson had testified he acted in self-defense after he was attacked by Colono and his cousin, Samuel Rodriguez, as he walked home from a bar on April 12, 2003. But prosecutors said Pring-Wilson became enraged and pulled a knife after Colono ridiculed him for stumbling home drunk.
“On the day my son was killed, time stopped; the clock stopped,” the victim’s mother, Ada Colono, wrote in a statement. “I feel that what I am living is not real. Before, I had hope in life. Now, the light has been turned off.”
She wrote of the pain of losing the youngest of her five children, and of hearing his daughter, Jade, who was 3 at the time of his death, ask, still, “Where is my daddy, and when is he coming back?”
The victim’s sister, Desmaris Colono, bitterly alluded to the defense’s attempts to “vilify” her brother, a high school dropout with a juvenile criminal record but who had earned his graduate equivalency diploma and was set to train for work as a postal worker.
“And it’s all Alexander Pring-Wilson’s fault, the man who thinks he’s God,” she said.
In October 2004, a jury declined to convict Pring-Wilson of murder, instead finding him guilty of voluntary manslaughter. A judge sentenced him to six to eight years in state prison. But an appeal led to a second trial, which ended with a hung jury.
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