A Harvard grad student with a bright future, Alexander Pring-Wilson, or "Sander" as his friends call him, says he acted in self-defense when he stabbed 18-year-old Michael Colono five times in the chest.

Now, the Ivy Leaguer faces a lifetime behind bars. Jury selection is under way in Pring-Wilson's first-degree murder trial in Cambridge, Mass.

According to court documents, Michael Colono was sitting in the backseat of a friend's four-door Chevy at 1:45 a.m. on April 12, 2003, when he spotted Pring-Wilson, drunk and shuffling by in flip flops and a rain slicker.

"Will you look at that guy staggering up the street?" Colono said to his cousin, Samuel Rodriguez and Rodriguez's girlfriend, Giselle Abreu, who were sitting in the front seat.

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The teens had just ordered a pie from Pizza Ring and waited in the car in front of the parlor.

Pring-Wilson, 25 at the time, was walking home to nearby Somerville, after spending the evening with two female friends at the Western Front bar, listening to reggae and drinking whiskey and sodas.

When the trio in the Chevy laughed at the tipsy student, he allegedly turned back and asked Colono if he had "a problem."

Michael Colono lived with his mother and had a 3-year-old daughter, Leah Jady.

At 200 pounds, the 6-foot, 1-inch Pring-Wilson outweighed the victim by almost 30 pounds, according to several news reports.

After their verbal confrontation, prosecutors say, Pring-Wilson opened the door to the back seat and challenged Colono to a fight. According to Rodriguez and Abreu, Colono accepted and got out with his hands up.

The couple later told police that they thought they saw Pring-Wilson deliver a series of blows to Colono's body. But those thrusting movements only looked like punches. In reality, the Ivy Leaguer was stabbing Colono repeatedly with a three-inch pocket knife.

Rodriguez said he struggled to get out of the car to come to his cousin's aid, but the passenger-side door was broken, so he had to roll the window down and tug on the outside handle to get out.

Rodriguez ran around the front of the car and punched Pring-Wilson in the head just as Colono yelled out that the defendant was carrying a knife.

The cousins scrambled back into the car and drove off. Moments later, Colono lifted his bloodied shirt and only then realized, according to police, that he had been stabbed.

In their panic to get Colono to a hospital, however, Abreu and Rodriguez got lost. After several attempts to flag down motorists for help, Rodriguez dragged his cousin out of the car and laid him on the sidewalk.

"Stay with me," he said repeatedly, according to reports. 

A police cruiser finally spotted them and an EMT crew rushed the rapidly deteriorating Colono to the hospital.

At 3:15 a.m., Michael Colono was pronounced dead. A medical examiner ruled it a homicide due to multiple stab wounds.

Next: Two victims?