A key witness to a homicide yesterday said he lied and implicated a defendant to get shrimp and fries, a Newport cigarette and a visit with his girlfriend earlier this week. However, on the witness stand yesterday he said he was under oath and testified "the truth" was that defendant wasn't in the car during the 2007 drive-by slaying in California-Kirkbride.

Jurors heard from the backseat witness, currently an inmate at the Allegheny County Jail, who originally told police the co-defendants Drew Pritchett and Dorian Peterson were in the front seat during two back-to back drive-by shootings.

The prosecutor said earlier this week that a bullet extracted from the victim in the nonfatal shooting in Perry South and a bullet taken from slaying victim Terrance Monroe, who was shot in California-Kirkbride, matched the gun found in the rental car that Mr. Pritchett and two other passengers were stopped in that night.

Police handcuffed the trio and took them to police headquarters.

After hours of questioning, the witness, who was then 17, wrote "This is the shooter" beneath a mug shot of Dorian Peterson. He told detectives that Mr. Peterson was sitting in the front passenger seat wielding a rifle. He testified yesterday he only told detectives that in the hours after the shooting because they told him to, and they had threatened him with life in prison if he didn't give up the information.

On Wednesday, while he was waiting to be called to the stand, a homicide detective took him to lunch at Chupka's on the South Side with his girlfriend and he said he agreed "to cooperate, to go along with all the evidence they had against the defendants."

Yesterday, when he was finally called, he assumed a defiant pose, his knees slung wide apart, and leaned on a wooden cane he uses because a shooting injured his back. He glared at the prosecutor during direct examination.

He said OGs (Old Gangsters) from Manchester wouldn't go to "the cave," a nickname for the block on Morrison Street where Mr. Monroe was killed, unless it was to shoot someone.

He testified that Mr. Peterson, whose mug shot he'd identified, was not there and was not the gunman and he didn't know the man who pulled the trigger on the shotgun.

He said that Mr. Pritchett drove the rental car during the two shootings. Under cross-examination by Mr. Pritchett's attorney, Brent McCune, he backed off that detail as well, admitting "I told a bold-faced lie."

He repeated twice that his cousin, not Mr. Pritchett, was driving the rental car.

Mr. McCune said DNA evidence from the steering wheel showed that the witness's cousin could not be ruled out as a driver, whereas Mr. Pritchett could be ruled out.

The cousin also was shot after cooperating with police and has been avoiding testifying in the homicide case for two years, Assistant District Attorney Steven M. Stadtmiller said.

Testimony continues today.

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