Trial begins in '95 killing that sparked reprisals

Accused maintains it was self-defense

Christina Centeo broke into tears yesterday as she talked about her fiancé, Bobby Mendes, who was slain on a Boston street in 1995, a killing that started a brutal civil war among the city's Cape Verdeans that led to some two dozen more killings.

"He told me he'd be right back," Centeo said of the night of Oct. 10, 1995, when Mendes walked out onto a Dorchester street. With tears running from her eyes, she added, "He never came back."

Nearly 13 years after Mendes's death, Suffolk Assistant District Attorney Dennis H. Collins yesterday singled out a well-dressed man wearing glasses in the Suffolk Superior Court room and said he was the killer - Arnaldo (Nardo) Lopes.

Collins told the jury during opening arguments of Lopes's trial that Lopes stabbed Mendes to death as part of his anger at the Mendes clan, which Lopes said had snitched to police. Lopes believed that snitching led to his February 1995 gun arrest and trial, which was set to start the day after Mendes was slain, Collins said.

" 'How come I'm the only one going to jail around here?' " Lopes told a Mendes relative earlier that night, according to Collins.

But his lawyer, Kevin J. Reddington, told jurors yesterday that Lopes stabbed Mendes to death in self-defense as Mendes and his cousins formed a circle and menaced him with pieces of wood and a knife. Mendes tried to kick Lopes's feet out from under him, he said, and knock him to the ground.

Reddington contrasted the two combatants: Lopes, charged with second-degree murder, was 17 years old, a slightly built teen who was well under 6 feet tall and weighed 130 pounds; Mendes was nearly 6 feet tall, well-muscled, and weighed over 200 pounds.

"You've got a 17-year-old kid . . . and a 23-year-old guy," Reddington said.

Listening as the lawyers spoke and a half-dozen witnesses took the stand was Mendes's mother, Isaura, who became one of the city's best-known advocates for peace after her son's killing. She has since lost another son, Alex, to street violence.

Yesterday, she sat with a calm expression as a third son took the stand and described growing up with Lopes, and how they had a falling out over Lopes's snitching accusation.

On the night his brother died, Pompilio (Steve) Mendes was 17 years old and met with Lopes in an Uphams Corner parking lot, where he said Lopes was drinking heavily.

Lopes repeated his accusation that the Mendes clan, especially a cousin, had "snitched" to police, an assertion that Mendes testified he told Lopes was not the case. "I just felt he had a lot to drink and I shrugged it off," Pompilio Mendes testified.

Pompilio Mendes said he went back home on Groom Street and was there an hour or so when he heard screams, including one coming from his mother.

"I heard screaming. It was neighbors and my mother," he said. He raced outside, where he saw a body lying on the ground.

"It was my brother, sir," Pompilio Mendes testified. "He was just lying still. He was just staring into space."

Bobby Mendes was rushed to Boston Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead from a stab wound to the chest.

Lopes called Boston police that night, insisted he acted in self-defense, but then fled Boston. In 2007, he was tracked down in Maryland and arrested. Boston police have estimated the number of retaliatory killings since the Mendes slaying at about 24.