Remorseless teen convicted of first-degree murder

The teen who shot 16-year-old Luis Navarro III for his new, shiny motorbike in Tacony Park last year showed absolutely no remorse to the victim's grieving family members in court yesterday, and instead blamed his defense attorney for his woes.

Eric Smith, 18, a lanky teenager with curly black hair and cold, vacant eyes, stood up and told Common Pleas Judge Shelley Robins New before he was sentenced to life in prison without parole:

"I want to say the trial [that] went on, I didn't think that was fair. . . . I didn't feel represented right. . . . The witnesses, they all come and judge me. The only one that can judge me is God."

Upon hearing that, one of the victim's two sisters, Yanessa Navarro, 19 - who earlier gave a tearful statement to the court - angrily blurted out from the gallery: "God don't want you!"

Smith, who turned to the victim's sister and told her she doesn't know him, said: "I'm innocent."

To that, Yanessa shouted back: "Don't f---ing talk to me!"

Navarro's murder gripped the city because of its utter senselessness and the cold-blooded killer's greed. Navarro, of Juniata Park, was a good student with a loving family. He learned his love for mechanics and bikes from his father, and just days before his murder, he had received the green-and-white Kawasaki motorbike as a gift from his mother for his good behavior.

Evidence at Smith's trial in September showed that on the afternoon of July 28, 2007, Smith jumped out of the bushes in Tacony Park, near Tampa and Louden streets, after he heard the purr of a motorbike. Navarro rode by, and Smith fired a .380-caliber semiautomatic handgun five times, hitting Navarro in the back three times. Navarro was a stranger to Smith.

The shooting came without warning, Smith's friend, Terrence Washington, had testified. Washington was with Smith that day to check out the park trails.

The deep pain that has pierced the Navarro family has been evident at each court hearing, as it was again yesterday. And as the victim's father, also Luis Navarro, so heart-wrenchingly told the judge yesterday, it seizes him in his most private moments.

"I cry alone because I don't want my wife to hear me," he testified as his wife, Caroline Lopez, sobbed softly in the gallery.

"I close myself in the car and start screaming!" the father said.

He described with disgust how Smith, after killing his son for the bike, "bragged about it" to friends and rode it the next day.

"He felt proud he caught a body. You feel proud, right?" the father said, angrily eyeing the defendant, who had a blank expression.

Because Smith, of Granite Street near Trotter in the Summerdale section of Northeast Philadelphia, was only 16 when he fatally shot Navarro, he was spared the possibility of receiving the death penalty; the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005 banned the death penalty for juvenile killers.

The judge yesterday imposed the mandatory sentence of life imprisonment without parole and symbolically added some consecutive sentences on his other convictions, as Smith's mother loudly burst into tears and wailed, "No, please, please God!"

Earlier, Yanessa Navarro sobbed as she told the court how her brother was her best friend and how losing him was "the hardest thing in the world."

Ashley Maldonado, 17, who was Navarro's fiancee, tearfully and angrily told Smith that "to do a crime like that over [something] material was pathetic."

Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Selber noted the crime's "ruthlessness and senselessness" and said that Smith had spent a year in a juvenile-placement facility on an animal-cruelty case, and had been released just a month before committing this murder.

At trial, three of Smith's friends, Washington, Sidney Dyches and Rahyle Lawrence, testified that Smith shot or told them he shot a boy on a motorbike. Two days after the shooting, Dyches and Lawrence helped Smith move the bike from Smith's house to Dyches' garage.

Defense attorney Daniel Rendine had fiercely fought for his client, grilling the teen witnesses about their motives in naming Smith as the shooter.

But the evidence clearly pointed to Smith, and a jury convicted Smith of first-degree murder, second-degree murder, robbery and weapons offenses.

The judge yesterday told Smith he had received a fair trial. *