WITNESS TO SLAUGHTER

Laying face down on the carpet, her arms duct-taped behind her back,
37-year-old jewelry maker Rosemond Dane listened horrified, she said, as one
by one, single bullets were pumped into the heads of her buddy Jennifer, her
sweetheart, Trey, and another man.

Then she felt the steel of the gun barrel against the back of her head.

"And before I could do anything, and even think about anything, I screamed,
'No!' " Dane testified in Manhattan yesterday, recounting last year's
pot-heist-turned-bloodbath known as the Carnegie Deli Massacre.

"And I threw my head back and over to the side, to see," she tearfully told
jurors, who are deciding the fate of the two accused murderers. "But I was
shot."

Dane's testimony - and that of the only other survivor, hairdresser Anthony
Veader - was the most dramatic and most damaging yet against the pair
accused of binding and shooting five people in the top-floor apartment above
the famous Theater District deli.

Prosecutors say Sean Salley, 30, and Andre Smith, 31, are triple murderers.

But while the two have confessed to coming to the apartment to rob pot
dealer Jennifer Stahl, 39, they have since recanted their confessions as the
product of police coercion. Salley now claims he was "forced" into the
robbery by Smith. Smith now claims he was never there.

Yesterday, the two survivors - who only lived because they instinctively
flinched away from the bullets - appeared to bolster the confessions'
validity.

Both survivors backed the defendants' original accounts of who did what,
when and where during the harrowing six-minute robbery - although Smith is
the only one who blames Salley for first pulling the murder weapon, a
.38-caliber revolver, from his jacket.

But for sheer dramatic impact, prosecutors gained much from the victims'
sometimes shaky-armed pointing across the courtroom, as Dane identified the
two defendants as the gunmen, and Veader fingered Smith as the one gunman
whose face he could remember.

Jurors had previously heard that Dane had first picked another man -
original massacre suspect Dwane Maultsby - out in a photo lineup instead of
Smith.

Prosecutors may have scored an even greater dramatic coup when Dane
described watching her sweetheart, Charles "Trey" Helliwell, as he was bound
with duct tape - then watching him die.

"While I was kneeling with him, maybe a minute or two, I knew that I was
losing him," Dane said, sobbing, as Helliwell's parents and other family
members wept along in the gallery.

"I knew that he was dying."

Veader's testimony was equally gripping.

He recounted hearing Dane crying over Helliwell's body, in the moments
before the cops arrived, "Baby, please get up! Please get up!"

"I called my partner to tell him I love him," Veader remembered of the call
he made after dialing 911. "I didn't know if I was going to survive or not."

Also yesterday, jurors heard Salley's nearly two-hour confession tape,
chilling in its almost casual-toned recounting of how he held a gun to
Stahl's head.

"I was holding it like that," Salley told the DA, standing and pointing a
finger to demonstrate. "And it just - it just went off."