Pair guilty in Pough's murder
Shooter of 18-year-old single dad to get life without parole
A jury found yesterday Antoine Riggins guilty of first-degree murder for the shooting death of Terrell Pough, 18, who had been lauded in
People
magazine as a single dad working hard to support his 2-year-old daughter.
Riggins will get the mandatory sentence of life without parole.
Co-defendant Saul Rosario was found guilty of third-degree murder for supplying the gun that his friend Riggins used to shoot Pough in the back of the head.
Both defendants confessed their roles in the Nov. 17, 2005, shooting in signed statements to homicide detectives.
Riggins told police that after shooting Pough over an unpaid $1,000 cocaine debt, he drove the victim's car to the home of his ex-girlfriend Amoy Archer and her sister Autumn Parker, left the gun with Archer, and told her what he'd done.
Archer and Parker confirmed that in court.
Then Riggins changed his story. Testifying in his own defense, Riggins said he never told police anything about the murder and had spent that night at a lady friend's house, doing his homework with Rosario's help.
Assistant District Attorney Carmen Lineberger brought the lady friend, Darlene Taylor, into court, where she said that Riggins and Rosario weren't at her house on the night of the murder.
She said Riggins had called her repeatedly from jail, asking her to say he was at her house that night, but she testified that she couldn't because "I didn't want to lie."
Taylor testified that after learning about the murder from news reports, she confronted Riggins and "he said he did it."
Barbara McDermott, Rosario's attorney, read a jailhouse letter that Rigginshad written to her client, warning him not to snitch: "That telling s--- get you killed out there . . . Not by me. By [expletives] don't like rats."
Yesterday, Richard Nesbitt, the victim's uncle, said the family still believes that Pough "was not involved with drugs."
"Terrell was a young black man we could all look up to," Nesbitt said, "and that was torn down by the murderer's statement that this was about drugs.
"The murderer was the only one who said this was about drugs. The family believes it was about something else."
Lineberger said, "According to Riggins, he sold drugs to Terrell, who owed him $1,000. It doesn't mean Terrell was a player, standing on the corner selling drugs. It could have been a one-time thing. We'll just never know." *