Marcus Richardson was filled with regret after he stabbed fellow student Contrell Townsend in the Montbello High School cafeteria in January 2005, a Denver jury was told today.
“He kept telling me, ‘I messed up, I messed up’,” Derek Parks testified in Richardson’s second-degree murder trial. “I asked him what he was going to do and he said he didn’t know.”
Parks, a close friend of the then 16-year-old Richardson, said he grabbed Richardson after he heard that Townsend had been stabbed during an altercation in the lunchroom.
Together they walked out of the school as teachers, Denver police and school security guards rushed to help the fatally wounded 17-year-old Townsend.
Parks said that Richardson, who was normally “quiet and laid back,” had earlier been challenged to a fight by Townsend.
They started to go outside to fight but when they saw the school principal near the tennis courts, they turned around and went back to the school cafeteria. There, Parks said, Townsend and Richardson again exchanged words.
They began to wrestle, with the bigger Townsend quickly getting the upper hand, slamming Richardson down and holding him in a headlock. He said Townsend suddenly got up and ran off. That’s when he heard Townsend had been stabbed and Parks grabbed his friend and left.
Earlier, the first teacher on the scene, Sharon Cochran, testified that she was monitoring the cafeteria when she heard a “boom” and saw Richardson, whom she had taught 9th grade English, and another student fighting and rolling around on a table top.
She said that as she approached, a second fight – apparently related to the Richardson fight – broke out between two other students in front of her and she ordered them to stop. She said she then ran for assistance and when she re-entered the cafeteria, she heard a scream and saw Townsend on the floor, face down. He appeared to be clutching something under him, Cochran said.
She said that as Townsend was turned over, a fully-opened pocket knife fell to the ground.
Of the more than a dozen witnesses who testified before Cochran, none said that Townsend was armed. Many have said they saw Richardson with a knife.
Prosecutor Adrienne Greene suggested to Cochran that perhaps the knife she thought Townsend may have been clutching was the knife that Denver Police Officer Nelson Henry used to cut off Townsend’s shirt so Henry could stop the bleeding from the wounds.
Cochran conceded that it was possible the knife could have belonged to Henry, one of Montbello’s school resource officers. But she said that she saw the knife long before Townsend’s shirt was cut off.
Staff writer Howard Pankratz can be reached at 303-820-1939 or hpankratz@denverpost.com.
