Defendant in Kensington murder trial tells the jury: I'm innocent

The man accused of shooting into a crowd in Kensington, killing a woman and wounding three men in 2013, told a Philadelphia jury Friday that he was innocent - that he fled with scores of others at the sound of gunfire.

When the shooting happened, Luis "Bebe" Soto told the Common Pleas Court jury, he was on parole and "trying to change my life."

"I just came home from upstate," said Soto, a onetime drug-gang member who had been out of prison just three months when the shooting happened on April 9, 2013. "Once I heard shots, I took off."

Questioned by defense attorney Jack McMahon, Soto denied playing any role in the incident, at Somerset and Lee Streets, that began as a fight between two women shortly before 6 p.m., grew into a melee with more than 30 combatants, and ended when the shots rang out.

Amanda Martinez, who in a few days would have turned 21, was shot and killed, and three men were wounded: Soto's half-brother, Jose Torres, then 22; Carl Walden, 33; and Larry Robinson, 18.

Soto, 27, insisted he did not have a gun that day and, despite prior convictions for drug dealing, never owned a firearm. Neither did members of his drug gang, he added.

"I didn't need anybody to watch my back," Soto told the jury.

Soto said he was at Water Street and Somerset watching the melee a block away because "I was nosy," but left when gunfire erupted.

The defendant's testimony was met with incredulity by Assistant District Attorney Carlos Vega, who questioned why two witnesses identified Soto as the gunman who sprayed the crowd with a .40-caliber semiautomatic pistol.

Vega questioned whether Soto had really been reformed, noting that Soto was being paid "under the table" by a Bridgeport furniture store and balancing relationships with a new girlfriend and the mother of his two teenage sons by using separate cellphones and sleeping at his mother's house on Lee Street, just north of Somerset.

McMahon's main defense witnesses were Soto and his mother, Dianilda Torres, who testified that she did not see Soto during the incident. She identified the gunman as a short Latino dressed in a black shirt and jeans who had a revolver - not a pistol.

No gun was recovered but a ballistics expert testified that seven fired cartridge casings and three bullet fragments found at the scene came from a .40-caliber semiautomatic pistol.

Although two prosecution witnesses identified Soto as a shooter that day, one testified that Soto was with another unidentified man who also had a gun and fired.

Much of the rest of Friday's testimony involved prosecution and defense rebuttal witnesses contradicting or buttressing Soto's testimony.

Soto, for example, said that after he learned his brother was wounded, he went to Episcopal Hospital and stayed with his mother while Jose Torres was in surgery.

Vega, however, called two police officers who testified that Jose Torres was never at Episcopal; he was taken directly from Lee Street to Temple University Hospital.

Testimony in the trial ended Friday. On Monday, the jury of 10 women and two men will listen to McMahon's and Vega's closing arguments, get instructions in the law from Judge Glenn B. Bronson, and begin deliberating.