MANCHESTER — Testimony began Monday in Hillsborough County Superior Court North in the second murder trial of Charles Glenn Jr., 30, accused in the fatal shooting of Leonard Gosselin Aug. 30, 2005.

Glenn was found innocent in July 2006 of first-degree murder, but after five days of deliberation, a jury deadlocked on lesser charges.

Glenn now faces charges of second-degree murder, falsifying physical evidence, criminal threatening, attempted robbery and felon in possession of a firearm.

In opening arguments, Assistant Attorney General Karin Eckel said Gosselin, 22, died after he struggled with Glenn during an attempted robbery, while defense attorney David Ruoff told jurors that Glenn was set up and another man fired the shot that fatally wounded Gosselin.

After jurors and alternates traveled to the site where Gosselin was shot in the back in an SUV outside 35 Log St., Eckel told them that Glenn arranged for a drug sale, but intending all the time to rob the customer. “His rent was due and he needed to pay his drug supplier,” said Eckel.

She said Glenn had his then-girlfriend, Wanda Diaz, and her brother, Chad, set up a drug deal to sell $500 worth of Oxycontin pills. But when Glenn showed up at Chad Diaz's residence, he pointed a gun at Diaz and said: “Sorry, dude, no pills. The connect needs dough,” and nudged Diaz out of the apartment.

Outside in the hall, said Eckel, Diaz fled out the back of the building and headed for a nearby Walgreen's to make a warning phone call to the ostensible drug buyer, Joseph Salvatore.

But Salvatore, with Gosselin in the front passenger seat, didn't get the call before Glenn went outside and climbed into the back seat of Salvatore's SUV.

Eckel said that during a struggle inside the SUV, Glenn shot Gosselin, who then stumbled out of the SUV, fatally wounded. She said Glenn then ran for his van and drove off, but not before Salvatore threw an electrical tape-wrapped pipe at the vehicle, shattering a window and landing inside.

She said Glenn's friend, Thomas Williams, drove him to Massachusetts and during the ride, Glenn “admits to Williams that he popped a kid.” The gun used to shoot Gosselin was never found.

The prosecution contended Glenn's mother, Trina Ghedoni, sent police on a wild goose chase, directing them to Portland, Maine, although she and her boyfriend were captured on video buying a ticket to Colorado for Glenn, who went to stay with a sister there.

Defense attorney David Ruoff said the Attorney General's Office got it all wrong in charging Glenn. “He was set up,” said Ruoff, by Chad Diaz, Joseph Salvatore and Leonard Gosselin, who was a cousin of the Diaz siblings. Glenn fled after the shooting, because “he was on probation at the time,” said Ruoff.

The defense contends that Salvatore is the man who fired the gun that killed Gosselin and that the testimony of key prosecution witnesses is suspect, that they were trading testimony for plea deals.

Ruoff also said the collection of evidence was significantly flawed. “There is a complete lack of forensic evidence,” he said.

The first prosecution witness, former Manchester resident Ethan Webb, 23, testified he and a friend were tossing a football when the SUV driven by Salvatore, with Gosselin as a passenger, pulled up. Webb, now living in Las Vegas, said he saw a black man come out of the building and get into the SUV and a little while later: “I heard somebody screaming really loud.”

Webb said a man got out of the front passenger seat, still screaming. “He ran in a circle, then he fell on the ground next to the SUV,” said Webb.

While Gosselin lay on the ground, he said, the black man got out of the rear of the SUV and got into a Dodge Caravan parked between two buildings. “The van peeled out in reverse, then peeled out going forward,” said Webb. But as the van went past the SUV, said Webb, the SUV's driver grabbed a tire iron and pitched it at the vehicle, shattering a window and landing inside.

On cross examination, Webb repeatedly responded: “I don't remember,” to defense attorney Mark Howard's questions about the black man's clothing, the color of the van, whether Gosselin greeted the black man outside the van, whether Salvatore took anything from the stricken man's pockets, and other information Howard referred to from Webb's statements to police shortly after the shooting,

When Manchester Police Sgt. John Patti, who had responded to a police radio call of “shots fired, man down” while patrolling in plainclothes in an unmarked car, took the stand, Ruoff sought to establish that the shooting scene was not properly secured and forensic evidence was not collected. In response to Ruoff's question about why the victim's hands and those of Salvatore were not tested for gunpowder residue, Patti said GSR is “easily transferred or degraded.” Sometimes, he said, the result is a false negative. The trial continues today.

dvincent@unionleader.com