Prometheus 6   

Justice, Safety and the System: A Witness Is Slain in Brooklyn
By WILLIAM GLABERSON

t had been nearly 10 months since Bobby Gibson had watched a stranger dressed in black ride a bicycle into a Brooklyn schoolyard, draw a gun from his waistband and kill his friend.

Now he was ready to walk into a courtroom to testify in the murder case. But on the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant, the word had been out for months: "lie or die," as one neighborhood girl put it. The half brother of the defendant in the schoolyard shooting, himself a suspect in another slaying, was said to be tracking down witnesses. People said money had changed hands. Eyewitness accounts had been recanted.

Still, on June 27, 2002, with the trial set to begin, Bobby Gibson's name was there, on a list of witnesses read aloud in a courtroom on the seventh floor of State Supreme Court in Brooklyn.

Two days later, Bobby Gibson was dead, shot through the heart a block from the schoolyard where his friend had been killed.