EASTERN PA. Man, 3 teens charged in death of teenager

A judge ruled there was enough evidence to send the case to trial.
PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- In her last 90 minutes of life, 15-year-old Christine Ham was stabbed, choked, smothered, kicked, jumped on, tossed in gasoline and dumped in a river.
She called out to a boyfriend that she loved him, then crawled onto the bank to die as he walked away, according to a statement he gave police.
In a case that eerily parallels another grisly teen slaying in Philadelphia, the boyfriend and three teenage friends are now charged with killing Ham.
In both cases, the friends met to plan the crime and used a sexual tryst to lure the victims to their deaths, police said.
On Wednesday, a judge ruled there was enough evidence to send the case to trial.
Statements
In preliminary hearings, police read statements given by Ham's boyfriend Derrell Savage, 20, and her friends Damarcus Hamms, Felicia Dawson and John Garrett in the days after Ham was killed at a Southwest Philadelphia housing project.
"Christine liked [Dawson] and Christine looked up to [her] as a big sister," a detective testified, reading from Savage's statement as Dawson, 19, scowled.
Ham, a Chester High School sophomore, was killed because her city friends blamed her for a March 13 rumble in Chester, they told police. After a debate over whether Chester -- a blighted small city just south of Philadelphia -- had any verifiable gangs, the big-city visitors were jumped by supposed members of the Bloods who came running out of a house in Ham's neighborhood.
"I was beat up by a bunch of guys with pipes and bats," Savage said, according to his police statement.
As they rode the bus home from Chester, they started plotting revenge, he said in his statement.
"This was a setup for awhile. We knew what we were going to do," Dawson, 19, allegedly told police.
Toward the end of a daylong visit to Philadelphia on April 23, Ham agreed to have sex with Dawson outside while the men watched, Dawson said in her statement.
Instead, Hamms, 19, pulled out a long kitchen knife and stabbed her with such force the knife broke, he told police. He and Dawson used that knife and Dawson's 5-inch pocketknife to stab Ham at least a dozen times, while Savage covered her mouth and helped drag her in a gas-soaked trash can to the Schuylkill River, police said.
Garrett, 17, helped plan the crime and served as a lookout, police said.
"They stabbed her. They choked her. They smothered her. They tried to set her on fire. They threw her in the river. And she survived all that," said Assistant District Attorney Mark Gilson, who said Ham ultimately bled to death. "It takes a lot to kill a person."
Ham lived with her maternal family in Chester but often hung out in Philadelphia, where her late father's family lives.
Mother's response
Her mother, Joan Ignudo, said Wednesday's disturbing testimony did not come as a surprise.
"No, because I already heard it before," Ignudo said, declining to comment further. She previously said her headstrong daughter often stayed out late and, despite warnings, never worried about her safety.
In March, another teenage girl found herself on the witness stand in the same courthouse, testifying about the spring day in 2003 when she and three male friends killed 16-year-old Jason Sweeney. Justina Morley was a 15-year-old Catholic school eighth-grader when she lured Sweeney to a remote meeting place, where he was pummeled with a hatchet, a hammer and rocks. The teen killers spent his $500 paycheck on a drug binge.
"It's an unfortunate circumstance ... that young children today seem to be more and more implicit in these kinds of offenses," defense lawyer Perry DeMarco, who represents Savage, said outside the courthouse Wednesday.
He said his client said he tried to warn Ham beforehand and sought out police the morning after she was killed.
Still, DeMarco conceded the case will be difficult to defend. The recent Sweeney trial, which resulted in life sentences for the three males and a 171/2 to 35-year sentence for Morley, rekindled public outrage over those young killers.
"The obvious viciousness of this [Ham's] attack makes it a real uphill battle," De Marco said.