SURVIVORS' CALL FOR HELP IS HEARD IN KILLINGS OVER CARNEGIE DELI

The voice on the recording sounding shaky, frightened and desperate: "A
bunch of us have been shot!" a man screamed. "I'm bleeding out of the side
of my head and I'm losing a lot of blood. Please, God!" he cried, later
adding: "They came in, they broke in and they had guns."

"Hurry please," the man, Anthony Veader, said, the pace of his voice
changing from an avalanche of words to something slower, like a prayer.
"Hurry up."

In State Supreme Court in Manhattan yesterday the juries hearing the
separate trials of the two men accused of shooting five people in an
apartment above the Carnegie Delicatessen last May heard the cries of the
two people who survived as prosecutors played a tape of their call to a 911
operator.

The men accused of second-degree murder in the shootings, Andre Smith and
Sean Salley, are being tried separately though in the same courtroom
because they blame each other for what happened after the botched robbery
of a drug dealer on May 10, 2001.

The robbery left three people dead: Jennifer Stahl, a former actress who
sold marijuana out of her apartment above the delicatessen, and two of her
guests, Stephen King, 32, and Charles Helliwell III, 36.

Mr. Veader and Rosemond Dane, 36, lived to describe to the operator what
had happened.

Friends and family members of the victims sat in the back rows of the
courtroom and seemed to brace themselves as the tape began to play. Some
held their heads in their hands or covered their mouths.

The tape exposed the apparent chaos in the apartment, on Seventh Avenue
between 54th and 55th Streets, as Mr. Veader struggled to figure out the
apartment's street address and floor and the number of people who had been
shot. The operator asked at least six times for information about the
apartment's location, and Mr. Veader could be heard on the tape calling out
to Ms. Dane for the answers.

At first Mr. Veader said they were at 55th and Broadway, then he said they
were in building number 454. (They were actually at 854 Seventh Avenue.)

Mr. Veader also asked Ms. Dane: "How many of us have been shot?" Ms. Dane
can be hard screaming from the background: "Four." She had apparently
overlooked one person.

Pictures taken at the crime scene by a police detective showed in graphic
detail the bodies of the two men who died. They were lying face down in Ms.
Stahl's living room, their hands and ankles bound with duct tape. The
dozens of pictures of the apartment were shown on three television monitors
to the court, as prosecution's witnesses outlined how evidence,
particularly fingerprints, was collected after the shootings.

The pictures also showed a glimpse of Ms. Stahl's world. Poster-size menus
advertised selections of marijuana, some priced at $640 an ounce. Near the
menus was what looked like a scrapbook of marijuana samples. Another
photograph showed a sign that read "Closed Mondays."

Prosecutors say fingerprints left at the scene, along with video images
from the building's surveillance camera link Mr. Salley and Mr. Smith to
the killings.

Mr. Salley said that he wanted only to ask Ms. Stahl for drugs to sell in
Newark when Mr. Smith strong-armed him into a more violent crime. Mr. Smith
contended that he was nowhere near the apartment on the night of the
killings, and that the authorities have the wrong man in him.