By JULIE SHAW
The Philadelphia Daily News
PHILADELPHIA — A grandmother was acquitted yesterday of witness intimidation, but her grandson didn’t have it so good.
At his third trial, Tashan Bundy, 19, was convicted of first-degree murder in the 2004 shooting death of a security guard outside a North Philadelphia club.
The retrial, involving four defendants - including Bundy and his grandmother, Joyce Harris, 54 - gave a Common Pleas jury a peek into the world of how inmates make three-way phone calls from prison. That’s a no-no.
Bundy’s half-brother, Terry “Smitty” Johnson, and friend David Gindraw, both 27, were also charged with intimidation.
Inmates get around the phone system by blowing into the receiver so that the computer monitoring the calls doesn’t pick up the sound of the buttons pushed by the person on the other phone to make the three-way call.
In court, the prosecution played calls that Bundy made to his grandmother’s landline phone. While he blew into the phone, she or someone else in the house dialed another number so that Bundy could speak to a third person who was not on his prison-call list.
Assistant District Attorney James Berardinelli alleged outside court that Harris had “served largely as the conduit, an enabler for Mr. Bundy and his brother, Mr. Johnson,” so that they could speak on the phone to “discuss intimidating witnesses.”
The calls were made primarily around the time leading up to Bundy’s first trial in May 2007.
Bundy, who lived with his grandmother on Parrish Street near 16th in the Francisville section of North Philadelphia, was 15 when he shot victim Robert Smith, 29, outside Dowling’s club on Broad Street near Thompson about 2:28 a.m. Dec. 19, 2004.
Smith, a security guard for a rap group playing at the club, happened to intervene in an argument that Bundy’s group was having with a club security guard, Berardinelli said in his closing argument Monday. So, Bundy shot Smith twice, killing him.
Three of Bundy’s friends, who were there that night - Robert Gray, Joseph Harville and Carnall Combs - eventually told police that Bundy had shot Smith.
That had Bundy concerned. He also wasn’t pleased that Gray’s mom apparently was telling her son to tell authorities the truth.
In a conversation Bundy had during a three-way call to “Smitty” Johnson on April 19, 2007, Johnson assured Bundy that he had gone to talk to Gray and Harville, and that Gray wasn’t going to do what his mom wanted.
“He [Gray] was like, ‘Smit, I know better, dawg,’ ” Johnson told Bundy. “ ‘You ain’t got to tell me nothin’ like that. I won’t, I don’t want to see him in there [jail].’ ”
In another call, on April 24, 2007, Bundy spoke to Gray and Harville during a three-way call. He didn’t want them to show up in court for a pre-trial hearing.
Talking to Gray, Bundy said: “You gotta like spend the night over somebody’s house or something.” He added: “You can’t even go to school on Thursday.”
Gray subsequently did not show up in court for that hearing.
The prosecution also contended that Harris, according to her cell-phone records, had called Gray’s house that month, also to tell him to not appear in court.
As for Gindraw, he was seen intimidating Harville after Harville testified at Bundy’s first trial.
“Literally in the hallway . . . after Joseph Harville testified, defendant David Gindraw jumped up out of the defense side of the gallery . . . got right up in Mr. Harville’s face,” prosecutor Berardinelli said after the verdicts yesterday. Police in the hall noticed that Harville was shaken.
Authorities confirmed this intimidation after later reviewing a conversation that Bundy had with Gindraw on a three-way call that night. Although Harville recanted on the stand, Gindraw apparently didn’t like what he said.
Gindraw told Bundy on the phone: “I ain’t like that work Zazz [Harville] was puttin’ in, man. . . . I didn’t like the way he was . . . they was catching him in the lie. Like if you’re gonna lie, make it seem like a lie’s the truth.”
Gindraw added that when Harville “walked out and he seen me, he damn near fainted.”
After the verdicts, Thomas Fitzpatrick, Harris’ attorney, said that Harris, who was acquitted of intimidation, “was vindicated as we expected her to be all along.”
Harris had worked in Philadelphia for Youth Advocate Programs (YAP), Inc., a Harrisburg-based organization that helps keep kids off the street. She was immediately suspended from her job after her arrest last August.
Martin J. D’Urso, chief of legal and corporate affairs for YAP, said this week that Harris ended her employment in September 2007. He said that policy dictated that he not comment on whether she was fired or had resigned.
Fitzpatrick said of Harris: “Now, unfortunately, she’s placed in a position where she has to continue to work to repair her reputation in the community.”
Fitzpatrick and attorneys Perry de Marco Jr. and Derrick W. Coker, who represented Gindraw and Johnson, respectively, contended in the trial that authorities didn’t prove that their clients were the ones who were actually speaking to Bundy in the calls.
Judge Shelley Robins New set sentencing for Sept. 8. Bundy faces mandatory life in prison.
Jurors returned mixed verdicts on the other men. Johnson was convicted of only intimidating Gray, while Gindraw was convicted of only intimidating Harville.
Juries in Bundy’s first two murder trials had deadlocked. *
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