August 24,2004
Mark Lineberger
Staff Writer
A Kinston man is on trial in Lenoir County Superior Court this week trying to prove he didn't bite off another man's ear in a local restaurant last year.
Lawyers for Kenneth Thigpen, 35, admitted that he had a fight with then 43-year-old Mark Conway at Ham's Restaurant in mid-March 2003. At some point during the fight, Conway lost about 70 percent of his left ear.
Whether Thigpen bit it off, as police investigators believe, or the ear was ripped off, will be for the jury to decide.
Thigpen pleaded not guilty to maiming without malice and assault with a deadly weapon.
Dressed in a black suit and flanked by two defense attorneys, he listened to Judge Paul Jones instruct the jury on how to determine his fate. Conway, his left ear mostly gone, sat in the audience surrounded by friends and family.
Assistant District Attorney Imelda Pate and defense attorney Keith Williams questioned potential jurors for more than two hours before both sides agreed on six men and six women from different walks of life.
In his opening statement to the jury, defense attorney Dal Wooten said he had at least 10 eyewitnesses from Ham's that night, most of whom had different recollections of what happened.
"You're going to hear about the blood they saw," Wooten said.
That blood should have been on Thigpen's body and clothes if he had bitten off Conway's ear, Wooten said, but the defense claimed to have evidence to the contrary. Instead, Wooten said, the ear was somehow ripped off when others tried to pull Conway and Thigpen apart.
"Mr. Thigpen is charged with biting the ear off," Wooten said, "Nothing else."
Pate skipped an opening statement and called her first witness, plastic surgeon Dr. Richard Zeri.
Zeri operated on Conway at Pitt County Memorial Hospital a few hours after the fight at Ham's and determined that the ear couldn't be reattached. Instead, Zeri salvaged what ear cartilage he could and gave Conway antibiotics to fight possible infection.
The wound was consistent with an ear that had been bitten off, Zeri said, something he's seen "at least a dozen times" over the course of his career.
But Zeri also told the defense that the pattern of tearing was also consistent with an ear that had been ripped off.
Tooth marks are not often left behind when an ear is bitten off, Zeri said, because of the way teeth tear through tissue and cartilage.
Wooten said he would call on the testimony of another medical expert from Jacksonville to dispute that the ear was bitten off.
The trial is expected to resume today.
Mark Lineberger can be reached at (252) 527-3191, Ext. 251, or Mark_Lineberger@link.freedom.com.
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