ASSOCIATED PRESS / NOVEMBER 2001 "The Pit," as the popular hangout Harvard Square in Cambridge, Mass., is known, is where Io Nachtwey spent time before she was allegedly murdered as a message to her friends.

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Jury considers
ex-isle woman’s death

BOSTON » Lawyers for two brothers charged with murdering a 22-year-old former Maui woman claimed their clients are scapegoats, blamed for the crime by a "cast of society's misfits."

Io Nachtwey: Prosecutors say she was killed to send a message to her friends

Ana White and Lauren Alleyne, both 21, avoided life in prison when they pleaded guilty to helping kill Io Nachtwey on Nov. 3, 2001. In exchange, they testified against four men who allegedly plotted the murder to send a message to other recruits in their fledgling gang.

In their closing arguments yesterday, lawyers for Ismael Vasquez, 27, and his 22-year-old brother, Luis, claimed the women are liars who could not keep their stories straight when police questioned them.

Elliot Weinstein, Ismael Vasquez's attorney, described White as a "manipulative, deceiving sociopath" who laughed, joked and sang along with Alleyne in the back of a police cruiser after they were arrested.

"These young women have a powerful reason to blame others," Weinstein said. "Would each lie to regain their freedom? Would each lie to avoid spending the rest of their lives in state prison? Of course they would, and they did."

Alleyne signed her plea agreement three days before the trial started, five months after White cut her deal.

"She saw the deal Ana White was getting," said Luis Vasquez's lawyer, Michael Doolin. "As a result of that, she's a parrot and she's a copycat."

Luis Vasquez is also charged with raping Nachtwey before she was struck with a martial arts weapon and stabbed a dozen times on Nov. 3, 2001. Her body was thrown from a railroad bridge into the Charles River, where joggers found it the next day.

Doolin said investigators did not find any physical evidence tying his client to the crime scene. There were no fingerprints and only two specks of blood found on the martial arts weapon, a pair of nunchucks, the lawyer added.

"Common sense would tell you there would be a lot more blood on these objects than there was," Doolin said. "The forensic evidence that has been presented to you leaves more questions than it does answers."

Weinstein said Ismael Vasquez was nowhere near the bridge where the slaying was believed to have taken place.

"He was far away, on the Cambridge side of the river, when (Nachtwey) was killed," Weinstein said.

Harold Parker, 31, and Scott Davenport, 31, also are charged with murdering Nachtwey, who moved to Massachusetts from Hawaii just months before she was killed. Their attorneys are scheduled to give closing arguments today.

After the prosecution's closing argument, jurors will begin deliberating, sifting through 315 exhibits and testimony from 31 witnesses. The trial has already lasted seven weeks.

Under the deal they struck with prosecutors, White and Alleyne could be freed in about five years, Weinstein said. The Vasquez brothers, Parker and Davenport face up to life in prison if convicted of first- degree murder.

Davenport, who was recruited because he had a car, testified that he initially refused to participate in the killing, but later agreed to stab Nachtwey after Ismael Vasquez threatened him.

Nachtwey frequently panhandled in the Pit, a brick plaza near the entrance to the Harvard Square subway station. It was here that she became friends with White and Alleyne. It was also in Harvard Square, prosecutors say, that the Vasquez brothers and Parker recruited the three young women to join their gang.

On Halloween night 2001, the recruits were ordered to steal valuables as a gang initiation. But when Nachtwey's friends failed to bring back any goods, Nachtwey was killed to send a message that disobedience would not be tolerated, prosecutors said.