Surprise confession during Chae-slaying trial

After more than two weeks on trial for a home-invasion murder, Amatadi Latham left his suit jacket on his defendant's chair yesterday, walked over to the witness box, and surprised the courtroom with a confession.

The things prosecution witnesses had said about him were true, he testified in a clear but hurried voice: He and two others had barged into a Montgomery Township home before dawn on Jan. 9, 2009, pulled guns on businessman Robert Chae and his wife, and duct-taped the family before robbing their safe and running away.

"I was present and seen everything that transpired inside the house," Latham, a lean 26-year-old, said repeatedly.

His two fellow robbers, he said, were not the other two defendants in the courtroom, Joseph Page and Karre Pitts, who like Latham face a second-degree murder charge that carries an automatic life sentence for Chae's suffocation death.

Latham instead fingered state witness Robert Eatman and a friend of Eatman's whom Latham said he knew only as "O," and whom he described as a bearded, broad-shouldered, and larger version of himself.

"I was pretty much following O's lead" in approaching Chae's house, Latham said.

In Latham's account, Pitts went unmentioned, and Page appeared only briefly - outside a Frankford house that Latham entered Jan. 8 to plan the home invasion.

"When I got to the meeting, [Page] was coming out of the house," Latham said. "I was going into the house."

His testimony contradicted what Eatman and getaway driver Sybil White had testified after pleading guilty to reduced charges of third-degree murder. They said Pitts, Page, and Latham rode to Chae's house in the Cadillac Escalade of White's mother, jumped out, and attacked the home to rob a safe that Chae's nephew Angelo Shin had told Page about.

Latham said a letter from his older sister last week compelled him to confess.

"Nobody knew" except Latham and defense attorney Cary McClain that the confession was coming, McClain said.

According to Latham, Shin told a guard at Chae's Center City retail shop about the safe, and the guard relayed the information to Eatman and Julius Wise, who orchestrated the robbery. Wise, who is awaiting trial, was laid up after hip surgery and unable to go along. Latham, however, had walked away from a halfway house on a drug sentence weeks before, and wanted the money.

"At the time, being a fugitive on the run, I didn't see what was wrong with it," Latham testified.

But the plan to rob the house without injuries went off the rails quickly. Latham said Eatman, who then weighed more than 400 pounds, had been the lead attacker - the role prosecutors assigned the relatively smaller Page. Latham said Eatman pistol-whipped Chae, then hit him again "smack dead in the face" after "O" had "obsessively" wrapped Chae's head in tape.

Blood from a broken nose clotted in the narrow breathing space left in the tape, killing Chae during the robbery.

"I never touched Mr. Chae," Latham said. " 'O' and 'E' did all that."

He said he was so appalled by the murder that he refused to look at the autopsy photos, in court or with McClain.

First Assistant District Attorney Kevin Steele pressed Latham about several apparent contradictions, including a call to White for a getaway ride that Latham said was placed before they realized that Chae's wife, Janice, had escaped - the event said to have triggered their flight.

And Latham insisted that "O" had said "he had to do what he had to do" when asked about killing Chae, a statement prosecutors allege was Page's in the Escalade.

Eatman, whom Latham called the violent attacker, was acknowledged to have driven separately.

Closing arguments are expected today.