Pring-Wilson Voice Mail Message Brought to Light in Trial

Jurors in the murder trial of former Harvard graduate student Alexander Pring-Wilson listened yesterday to the defendant’s razzled voice on a cellphone message recorded less than an hour after he fatally stabbed a local teenager in April 2003.

“I just got attacked by a group,” Pring-Wilson said on the message. “I fended them off. I stabbed him a couple of times and, um, don’t repeat this to the police.”

The presentation of the voice mail came just a day after jurors first heard the defendant’s voice in a 911 telephone call minutes after the stabbing on Western Avenue in Cambridge.

In the 911 call, Pring-Wilson appeared to lie to the police, telling the dispatcher that the perpetrators had “fucking run off.” But in the message played yesterday, he acknowledged having stabbed the victim, Michael D. Colono, and briefly described the altercation which ended in bloodshed.

The defense has argued the message, left for a friend with whom Pring-Wilson spent time earlier in the evening, corroborates their claim that he acted in self-defense while fending off an assault by Colono and Colono’s cousin, Samuel Rodriguez. But Adrienne Lynch, the assistant district attorney, used the tape yesterday to paint Pring-Wilson as a callous killer.

“Um, anyway, I had a swell time tonight,” Pring-Wilson said in the message to his ex-girlfriend, Jennifer Hansen. “I hope you guys made it home okay. Bye-bye.”

Testifying in Middlesex Superior Court yesterday, Hansen recalled the details of her night spent dining and drinking with Pring-Wilson and another friend. She noted that Pring-Wilson purchased a bottle of Jim Beam whiskey on the evening of the stabbing and repeatedly filled his glass with the alcohol at a local bar.

Yet Hansen concurred with other witnesses, who said Pring-Wilson was intoxicated but not stumbling over himself.

Later in the afternoon yesterday, Sgt. John Fulkerson of the Cambridge Police Department (CPD) recounted his initial encounter with Pring-Wilson on the morning of the stabbing.

“He said he was sorry,” Fulkerson recalled.

In pictures taken of Pring-Wilson hours after the stabbing and presented in court yesterday, he appeared disheveled and fatigued, with a visible bruise above his left eye. Defense lawyers have said the “quarter-sized” bruise is further evidence their client acted in self-defense, while prosecutors have dismissed the bruise as a minor injury.

CPD Officer James Green, testifying yesterday morning, said he remembered Pring-Wilson had been rubbing a “dime-sized welt” on the morning of the stabbing.

In His Own Words

While testimony over the past two days has focused on a largely mundane timeline of events, Pring-Wilson’s two phone calls in the hour after the stabbing have provided a vivid, if contradictory, picture of what occurred in the early hours of April 12, 2003.

The tapes present two of what the prosecution claims are four separate versions of that night’s events told by Pring-Wilson to the police. But Pring-Wilson’s lawyers have said their client suffered a concussion in his altercation with Colono and Rodriguez and could not form an accurate picture of the fight in its immediate aftermath.

Jeffrey R. Toobin ’82, a legal analyst for CNN, said Pring-Wilson’s phone calls would play a crucial role in the case.

“The defendant’s own words are always critical evidence in a trial, and if the jury sees him as a liar trying to cover up his own role, that’s very bad,” said Toobin, who is also a Crimson editor. “If the jury sees him as a good kid who was confused and panicked in a dangerous situation, that’s good for him.”

—Hana R. Alberts and Robin M. Peguero contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Zachary M. Seward can be reached at seward@fas.harvard.edu.