Jury set to rule in Morehouse student's slaying

By MEGAN MATTEUCCI

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A Morehouse student beat, stomped, bound and dumped an injured classmate in a trunk only because he was “stupid” and coerced, his defense attorney argued Thursday.

But prosecutors said the student tortured his friend for more than eight hours because he wanted to rob him and then cover up their crime.

Miles Allen is on trial in Clayton County Superior Court on charges he murdered Carlnell Walker, a junior at Morehouse.

A jury will decide Friday if Allen is guilty of 12 counts in connection to the deadly attack on the student.

“We know what the motive was: money, money, money,” Executive Chief Assistant District Attorney Jason Green told the jury Thursday afternoon in his closing argument.

Allen’s defense attorney Herbert Adams said the defendant was involved in the attack, but only because he was scared.

“He told you he was stupid and he showed it, but that doesn’t make him guilty of all these charges,” Adams told the jury.

Allen, 26, is the first of four defendants on trial. All four are charged with 12 counts, including murder, kidnapping, burglary and armed robbery.

On Thursday, jurors saw graphic photographs of Walker’s decomposed body and watched video of Allen’s hour-long interview with detectives.

Jurors heard Allen tell detectives that he and his friends repeatedly punched, stabbed and stomped on Walker. They hit him on the head with a hammer. After cutting off the victim’s dreadlocks, the group stripped Walker to his boxer shorts and dumped gasoline on him, threatening to set him on fire, Allen said in a taped interview with police.

Allen and his friends then bound and gagged Walker. They put him inside the trunk of his car, parked in the garage of his Riverdale home, Allen told police.

Detectives found him inside the trunk on July 8, 2006 – two weeks later. His mother, who was in California, called police concerned about not hearing from her son, a business major who always called home, prosecutors said.

An autopsy showed he died from hyperthermia because of the extreme heat.

Investigators found Allen’s handprints -- which contained the victim’s blood -- on Walker’s walls, prosecutors said.

Keith Roberts, Breylon Garland and Theordore Holliman are also charged in the murder and awaiting trial.

Prosecutors said the four men were looking for money when they attacked Walker. The 23-year-old Morehouse tennis star had been in a car crash a few months prior to the attack and had bragged about a financial settlement, Green said.

Adams said his client wasn’t looking for money; he was just scared the other defendants would harm him or his family if he didn’t participate in the attack.

“Miles told you he felted trapped,” Adams told the jury. “Miles Allen didn’t walk away when he had the chance to. He feared what Keith would do.”

Prosecutors dismissed the defendant’s claims of fear, coercion and peer pressure.

“We’re not talking about smoking a cigarette, or trying drugs for the first time,” Green told the jury. “We are talking about beating a man, stomping a man, threatening to burn him, putting him in a trunk, bound and gagged. That is not peer pressure.”

Dressed in a black suit, Allen sat quietly through the closing arguments, occasionally taking off his glasses to wipe a stray tear.

Green, a Morehouse graduate, ended his closing arguments showing jurors his student ID next to Walker’s ID.

“I was a student at Morehouse. I know some of those doors he could have walked through. And the person who washed all that away was Miles Allen. They made him just a case number,” Green told the jury. “He’s more than that.”

Allen’s family declined to comment Thursday.

The jury is scheduled to begin deliberations at 9 a.m. Friday. The trial started Monday.

District Attorney Tracy Graham Lawson said she is not seeking the death penalty in the case.