A Baltimore jury found a 23-year-old city man guilty of second-degree assault and conspiracy to commit first-degree assault yesterday while clearing him of first-degree murder and some handgun charges in a case in which the victim's body has never been found.
The jury deadlocked on numerous other charges, including second-degree murder and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder. Assistant State's Attorney Rita Wisthoff-Ito said she will retry Gary Froneberger on the charges that resulted in a hung jury.
Defense attorney Linwood Hedgepeth said he plans to request a new trial on the counts for which his client was found guilty.
"This is a good outcome considering this is a case where we don't have a body," she said. "Jurors want hard scientific evidence, like they see on CSI."
In closing arguments, Wisthoff-Ito said Froneberger and John Earl Linton, 25, who pleaded guilty to assault and conspiracy to commit assault last week and testified for the prosecution, pushed Abdul Rahim Azzie into the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River in February 2005. Azzie had been stripped of all of his clothes but his boxer shorts.
It was Froneberger, Wisthoff-Ito told the jury, who continued to "hit the victim with a stick or hit around him, whichever you want to believe," even after Linton told him to stop and Azzie begged for his life before drowning in the frigid water. Azzie's mother testified that her son, 18, couldn't swim well, Wisthoff-Ito said.
"It has been three years, and he's had no contact with his family, and there's been no verifiable sightings," she said. "We don't know what happened to the body, but that doesn't mean he wasn't murdered."
In closing arguments, Hedgepeth alleged that Linton and Froneberger's ex-girlfriend, who testified for the prosecution, conspired against him.
Hedgepeth said Froneberger would never have killed Azzie, his "good friend," over drug money that wasn't owed to him. Azzie, known as "Skinny," owed Froneberger's girlfriend, who was not charged, several hundred dollars, Hedgepeth said.
"She told Linton, 'I want his [expletive] beat,'" he told the jury. She "ordered the beating. ... But she ain't charged with a thing. ... She's a very smart lady."
Hedgepeth alleged that Linton and the ex-girlfriend concocted his client's role in the assault.
"The accomplices' testimony, it's tainted," Hedgepeth said. "She got Linton to do it because Froneberger wouldn't."
The only other key witness alleged that Froneberger told her, "You're not going to see Skinny anymore" the day after Azzie disappeared. But in an interview with police, the witness recalled the conversation occurring in the summer - and, during the trial, when it was "warm" - rather than on a cold day in February three years ago, Hedgepeth said.
Circuit Judge Lynn K. Stewart is scheduled to sentence Froneberger on April 17.
melissa.harris@baltsun.com