Harvard Student Guilty in Slaying

A Harvard University graduate student was convicted Thursday of fatally stabbing a teenage kitchen worker during a late-night street fight in front of a pizza parlor.

Alexander Pring-Wilson, 26, displayed no emotion as the jury, after five days of deliberations, found him guilty of voluntary manslaughter; prosecutors had sought a conviction of first-degree murder. Pring-Wilson also remained impassive as Middlesex County Superior Court Judge Regina Quinlan sentenced him to six to eight years in state prison out of a possible 12.

Relatives of the victim, 18-year-old Michael Colono, did little to hide their disappointment, gasping and emitting groans of disbelief as the verdict and sentence were handed down. Colono’s mother, Ada, began sobbing and was comforted by relatives.

Damaris Colono, the victim’s sister, made her feelings clear in a statement in court shortly before the sentence was rendered.

“Michael struggled in life, unlike Pring-Wilson,” she said. “The power that a white smart man has with money is disturbing. Money should not define justice.”

From when the crime occurred on April 12, 2003, the case reflected class and racial tensions in the community that is home to the country’s oldest university.

Pring-Wilson, then a student at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, had spent the evening bar-hopping with friends. He was walking home in the rain at 1:45 a.m., wearing a bright-colored poncho and flip-flop sandals.

Michael Colono, his cousin and his cousin’s girlfriend were sitting in a car outside the Pizza Ring restaurant, waiting for their order, when Pring-Wilson walked by.

“Will you look at that guy staggering up the street?” prosecutor Adrienne Lynch quoted Colono as saying.

Pring-Wilson approached the car, challenging Colono to repeat the remark, and a fight ensued.

Prosecutors said Pring-Wilson, who stands more than 6 feet tall, used a knife he was carrying to stab Colono five times in the chest and abdomen. Colono, a cook in a Cambridge restaurant, was slightly more than 5 feet tall.

Doctors said the fatal knife thrust penetrated the right ventricle of the victim’s heart. According to prosecutors, the altercation was over in 70 seconds.

“Michael Colono made fun of the defendant, and it cost him his life,” Lynch said.

Colono had recently received his high school equivalency diploma, and died the day before his daughter’s third birthday. Colono was on probation for selling crack cocaine.

Pring-Wilson, fluent in several languages, graduated from Colorado College. His father is a well-known defense lawyer in Colorado, and his mother is a former Colorado district attorney. Pring-Wilson, who had no prior criminal record, also was planning to attend law school after finishing graduate studies at Harvard.

After the incident, Pring-Wilson called police to report that he witnessed a dispute in which “perhaps someone was stabbed.” He also left a voice mail for one of the women he had spent the evening with, saying he had been attacked but had managed to fend off the assailants.

“Had a swell time tonight,” prosecutors said he had added in the voice mail.

During the three-week trial, Pring-Wilson’s lawyers insisted he acted in self-defense, drawing his 4-inch knife from his pocket only after he was pummeled repeatedly by Colono and his cousin. The defendant reenacted the encounter for the jury, cowering on the courtroom floor as if he were being attacked.

Pring-Wilson told the court that he approached Colono and his cousin in their car not because they were taunting him, but because he thought they were asking for directions.

Defense attorney Ann Kaufman broke into tears Thursday as she asked the judge to sentence her client to probation. Kaufman said Pring-Wilson’s privileged background was used against him during the trial.

“He’s worked all of his life. He comes from a family where all the children in the family worked,” she said.

“This isn’t about race, or class or privilege or wealth,” she continued. “What it’s about is what happened on that street between three people.”

During the proceedings, dozens of Pring-Wilson’s fellow graduate students filled the courtroom, along with Harvard faculty members. Colono’s relatives and neighbors also attended the trial.

Pring-Wilson had been free on $400,000 bail. He had been ordered to wear an electronic monitoring bracelet. Pring-Wilson withdrew from his graduate program last spring, about the time he had been scheduled to receive his master’s degree.

Although her office hoped for a stiffer sentence, Middlesex County Dist. Atty. Martha Coakley called the verdict fair. Asked if race or class entered into the decision, she said: “I’d like to think that the verdict was free of too much influence by any of those factors.”

Coakley said Colono’s family expressed reservations from the beginning about whether a Latino family from a poor neighborhood in Cambridge could get a fair trial when the defendant was a wealthy graduate student from Harvard.

She said prosecutors worked hard “to make sure there was no perception that this defendant got a break somehow.”

At Thursday’s sentencing hearing, Damaris Colono said: “Pring-Wilson may be a smart man, but I think he made a big mistake taking a life for egotistical reasons.”

Cynthia Pring, the defendant’s mother, said she sympathized with the victim’s family.

“I feel for them so strongly,” she said. “My son feels for them so strongly.”