MISSING PERSONS

Witness Defection

For L’Salle Harvey’s parents, it’s justice delayed.

by Frank Rubino

Although she doesn’t know it yet, Gwen Harvey won’t today lay eyes on the man who allegedly robbed and murdered her 22-year-old son as he rode his bicycle through Strawberry Mansion one early morning a year and a half ago.

Then again, Harvey has learned during her 49 years not to assume anything. “And you never know what to expect from the judicial system,” she sighs.

Dressed in a pink blouse and matching headscarf, Harvey sits on a bench inside the Criminal Justice Center’s courtroom 306 on this second Wednesday in March. It’s 10 a.m., but it’s already been a long day.

It’ll get even longer in an hour, when assistant district attorney Edward Cameron will huddle with Harvey and her family to explain that the preliminary hearing for Demetrius Wells—charged with the murder of L’Salle Harvey plus another homicide—has been shelved until May 28.

“He said they couldn’t find the witness [who’s reportedly implicated Wells in both killings],” Harvey later tells a reporter as she and her ex-husband Herbert Harvey, L’Salle’s father, stand in the center’s main concourse with their 20-year-old son Isaiah and 18-year-old daughter Irene.

“The police are looking for the witness,” Cameron tells the reporter that afternoon. “When they went to his address last night he wasn’t there. It’s typical of what you see in these kinds of cases.”

“He was going to attend college and become a phenomenal teacher,” the program’s director Diane Sandefur told PW last August, adding that he possessed a smile “that made you feel like all was right with the world.”

But all went wrong in L’Salle Harvey’s world in the wee hours of Aug. 31, 2006 after he left a condo complex at 16th and Callowhill streets where his mother worked as a concierge.

Late the previous evening he’d visited her there, as he often did. He planned to pedal his Schwinn home to Strawberry Mansion, as was also his habit. But he told Gwen Harvey he was going to first withdraw $20 from an ATM to buy Chinese food.

Bank records show he withdrew the money. But he never made it home.

Several hours before dawn, someone robbed and shot L’Salle to death across the street from Strawberry Mansion High School, blocks from the row house in which he rented a room from friends of his parents.

Although homicide Lt. Walter Bell says cops received an anonymous tip fingering the 22-year-old Wells shortly thereafter, they lacked physical evidence and weren’t able to hold him after he denied involvement.

But after arresting Wells for domestic violence eight weeks ago, detectives again interrogated him about the Harvey killing, and say he confessed to it and to the May 2007 shooting death of 54-year-old Walter Coleman, also of Strawberry Mansion.

That’s where things get sketchy, and where the no-show witness comes into play.

In a big way.

On the other hand, Tinari allows that Wells killed both men.

Translation: Wells claims he acted in self-defense.

“The fact that they can’t use his statement alone is indicative of the statement not establishing a murder,” Tinari says. “The alleged confession is not a confession of murder. It’s something else.”

Asked to characterize his client, Tinari says Wells “is not someone who our investigation has revealed to be an overly aggressive individual.”

Cameron, while declining to delve into specifics, labels Wells’ self- defense claims “ridiculous.” He adds that robbery served as the defendant’s motive for accosting Harvey.

Gwen and Herbert Harvey also scoff at Wells’ self-defense argument.

“Even though what he’s saying is dumb, I’d really like to ask him why he thinks Sal would’ve been after him,” Gwen Harvey says, adding that Cameron informed her that Wells is claiming L’Salle Harvey, on his bicycle, pursued him on the morning of the killing.

“And he says the other guy [Coleman] was beating him with one of his crutches, so that’s why he shot him in self-defense,” says Herbert Harvey, weakened by a heart condition.

“It seems strange to me that everybody’s trying to get this guy.”

Cameron isn’t elaborating on what specific information the no-show witness has given investigators, but that the prosecutor has requested today’s postponement suggests it’s important.

Gwen Harvey suspects the witness is a onetime Wells confidant. She’s always felt certain that someone in Strawberry Mansion knew who ended her son’s life near the desolate corner of 31st and Nevada streets.

In any event, the prosecution clearly needs to find the witness pretty soon.

For now, though, it’s time for the Harveys to head their separate ways—Gwen to Southwest Philly, Herbert to Strawberry Mansion, where he lives with his second wife Maude.

Besides being disappointed by the postponement, they’ve endured a near-riot that erupted when a witness in another case momentarily failed to identify a defendant as a 21-year-old man’s killer. (A slew of the victim’s family members subsequently went ballistic, attacking the defendant’s courtroom supporters before security restored order.)

The fracas brought tears to the eyes of Gwen Harvey, a deeply religious woman.

“I guess that’s what they’re talking about when they say wild stuff happens down here,” she says, obviously shaken.

It’s been a really long day.