‘Electronic Proof’ Will Clear Client, Attorney Says

The suspect accused of shooting a San Clemente businessman as part of a “contract hit” is innocent, his attorney told a judge here Friday, and can document his alibi with electronic proof of where he was on the morning in question.

The defense’s report of new evidence in the attempted murder case against Paul Alleyne, 32, prompted the judge to delay Paul Alleyne the defendant’s preliminary hearing until June 21 in South Municipal Court.

But the man Alleyne is accused of shooting found the suggestion that someone else may have tried to kill him difficult to fathom.

“It’s hard to dispute eyeballs, and mine were there,” said an angry James Wengert, who makes his living as a private investigator.

Alleyne is accused of firing a single shot into Wengert’s face in what police allege was a contract hit ordered by the late Coleman Allen, owner of Premium Commercial Services Corp., a Huntington Beach finance firm linked to homicides in Hollywood and Fountain Valley.

Defense attorney Federico Sayre said Friday his new evidence shows Alleyne in downtown Hollywood on the morning Wengert was shot, April 10, and that “he could not have committed the shooting and still been in downtown Hollywood at that point.”

Beyond that, however, Sayre declined to discuss the nature of the evidence, except to say he obtained the “electronic proof” late Thursday from his investigator.

Prosecutor Tom Glazier declined comment on Friday’s developments.

Wengert, 48, said he learned of the defense’s claim of new evidence for the first time Friday. He was scheduled to testify at the preliminary hearing.

Shortly after the shooting, Wengert identified Alleyne’s mug shot in a photo line-up and maintained again Friday that no other suspect could have shot him.

But Wengert’s physical description of the man who shot him also is in question, Sayre said, noting that Wengert initially described his assailant as being 5-foot-9, 170 pounds. Alleyne is 6-foot, 160 pounds, according to the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.

Asked whether he might have named the wrong man, Wengert said flatly, “Nope.”

Wengert owes Premium Commercial more than $400,000, and his wife, Margaret, 62, had filed a lawsuit against the company three days before the June 1995 shooting death of flight attendant Jane Carver, 46, who police believed was killed in a case of mistaken identity.

The Wengerts once owned a home not far from Carver’s near the Fountain Valley park where she was shot--once in the face, in a manner similar to Wengert’s shooting.

On Friday, Alleyne’s attorney suggested to Municipal Court Judge Arthur Koelle that Wengert had simply misidentified the man who shot him.

“Before he ever saw Mr. Alleyne’s photograph,” Sayre said, Wengert had “identified the composite drawing of the shooter in the Jane Carver killing,” indicating that Leonard Owen Mundy--the suspect charged with Carver’s murder--could have shot Wengert as well.

At 5-foot-10, 150 pounds, Mundy is closer to the description Wengert gave Orange County Sheriff’s deputies, which corresponds to a similar height and weight reported by three witnesses to the Carver slaying, according to Sayre.

On this point, Wengert declined comment.

Mundy, 42, was arrested this month and is, like Alleyne, the owner of a small, Los Angeles-area business. Authorities say he and Alleyne are close friends.

Wengert was shot in an underground parking garage of the building where he works in San Clemente about 7:45 a.m. Sayre said the newly obtained electronic evidence shows Alleyne “at a fixed location in Hollywood” shortly thereafter.

He said Alleyne was at home in Los Angeles at the time of the shooting and could not have driven from San Clemente to Hollywood between 7:45 and the time indicated on the newly obtained electronic data, which he called indisputable.

“He couldn’t have gotten there that fast,” Sayre said, “unless he had a helicopter.”