They’d been inseparable since the eighth grade.
But Claire Higgins tearfully told a Brooklyn jury that the last time she saw her best friend, Imette St. Guillen, the two had parted in anger.
“I stood there,” Higgins said, shaking her head slightly as she testified at the murder trial of the man accused of strangling the young woman.
PEYSER: VICTIM WAS ‘GUILTY’ – OF BEING 24
“And I watched her walk away.”
Jurors listened as Higgins, 27, recounted bickering with St. Guillen about whether to leave the Pioneer bar on the Lower East Side on the morning of Feb. 25, 2006.
The jury will weigh the fate of Darryl Littlejohn, a bouncer at The Falls, the now-shuttered bar the 24-year-old student wandered into after she separated from Higgins. It was the last place she was seen alive.
Higgins fought back tears as she described a headstrong St. Guillen, who insisted on staying out even as Higgins hailed a cab to take them home.
“Imette said, ‘You know, I’m not going to come with you, after all,’ ” Higgins testified. “So I got out of the cab, and we continued to argue on the street about whether she would leave with me or continue being out.”
St. Guillen’s body was found about 14 hours later in a desolate, weed-choked area off the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn, bound and wrapped in a filthy blanket. A sock was stuffed in her mouth, and packing tape covered her face. Traces of the date rape drug GHB were found in her system.
Prosecutor Ken Taub explained during opening arguments yesterday how police analyzed an abundance of forensic and scientific evidence that all points to Littlejohn, 44.
Blood and skin matching Littlejohn’s DNA were found on the plastic ties binding St. Guillen’s wrists behind her back. The bouncer’s DNA was also recovered from a snow brush found next to the body.
The blanket wrapping the body contained hair matched to Littlejohn’s mother and old, dried semen matching the accused man’s dead brother.
Prosecutors also said cellphone-tracking technology showed Littlejohn’s phone traveling along the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn within an hour of the body’s being found.
Finally, Taub said he’d prove that Littlejohn was also the man behind two other heinous attacks on women — a kidnapping and a sexual assault, both in Queens, months before St. Guillen’s death.
“He did the same thing to two other women three months before, and until this case, he got away with it,” Taub told the jury.
St. Guillen’s mother, Maureen, and sister, Alejandra, stayed outside the courtroom as Taub projected chilling crime-scene photos of the dead woman.
Family and friends who were present, including St. Guillen’s stepfather, Frank Holbrook, averted their eyes or stared at the floor rather than view graphic color photos of the murdered woman, naked from the waist up, her long black hair protruding from the mask of tape covering her face.
Defense lawyer Joyce David promised to show that cops were framing Littlejohn to cover up for the real culprit — Dan Dorrian, the manager of The Falls and a member of a powerful family with links to former Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
“The family is rich, and they’re powerful, and they’re connected all the way up,” David said. “Their connections are what helped Dan Dorrian avoid justice in this case.”