McLemore goes before Phila. judge

Kyle McLemore returns to court today as a judge decides whether to uphold charges in the Palestra shootings. A key witness testified yesterday that Kyle McLemore -- the 21-year-old police arrested last week for the March 1 shooting on campus that left one dead and three injured -- was the "ringleader" of a group of four or five men who opened fire outside the Palestra. Jeffrey Noble, 20, who was allegedly shot and wounded by McLemore, testified at a hearing that McLemore was part of a group that shot and killed Noble's friend and neighbor, Anthony Davis, 22, of North Philadelphia. Noble did not specifically identify McLemore as being responsible for the shooting. McLemore's attorney Charles Peruto Jr. has argued that one of McLemore's companions actually fired the round of bullets that killed Davis and wounded Noble, passerby Latisha Feribee, 20, and College senior John La Bombard, 22, who was hit in the leg by a stray bullet as he worked in the Blauhaus on 33rd Street. Police have not arrested anyone else for the incident. Yesterday's two-hour hearing was held to allow Common Pleas Judge Eric Lillian to conclude whether to uphold the charges against McLemore, a resident of South Philadelphia. The hearing will resume at 11 a.m. today at the Criminal Justice Center. McLemore has been acquitted once before of murder charges, and both he and Davis have lengthy criminal records. The testimony of Noble -- the only witness to take the stand yesterday -- sheds considerable light on the arguments the defense is likely to make during the next few months. Noble said he was riding in the front passenger's seat of Davis' green Lexus as they left the Palestra after the Philadelphia Public League basketball championships. He described seeing a crowd rush forward as he and Davis were making their way through the dense traffic on 33rd Street just north of the Palestra after the game. He thought it was a fight, but Davis knew otherwise. "That isn't a fight. That's them," Noble quoted Davis as saying as he saw four or five armed men running toward his car. One of the men -- the "ringleader," as Noble described him yesterday -- allegedly was McLemore. Police have said Davis fired several shots from his own handgun before being fatally wounded. Noble suffered two minor gunshot wounds to his lower back. While McLemore is charged with all of the shootings, Peruto has previously said the actual shooter was someone else. "You're prosecuting an innocent man," Peruto said in an interview last week. He said he suspected another South Philadelphia man -- one with a "propensity for violence" -- of being responsible for the shooting. Peruto -- who also represented McLemore in his first murder trial in October 1994 -- was not immediately available for comment yesterday. He surrendered McLemore to police on March 17, two days after detectives from the Philadelphia Police Department's Homicide Unit obtained a warrant for his arrest. Peruto said McLemore, who is still on probation stemming from a narcotics arrest in July, was wrongly accused because of the bad blood between him and Davis. The feud was related to drugs, Peruto said, acknowledging that the Palestra gunfight was "a drug war." But he said his client, while "not extremely elated" with Davis as a person, "wasn't going to kill him." Investigators have suggested that Davis and McLemore were members of small rival "gangs" fighting a turf war over an area -- possibly a drug corner -- near 5th and Washington streets in South Philadelphia, an intersection they both "frequented."