If they had chosen to ignore each other, Alexander Pring-Wilson might be well on his way to a lucrative career in environmental law and Michael Colono might be married to the mother of his 3-year-old daughter.

But a brief violent encounter between the two men on a rainy night in Cambridge, Mass., began with insults, escalated into a fight and ended in the death of Colono, 18, from a stab wound through his heart.

The April 2003 incident also forever changed the course of Pring-Wilson's life. Instead of receiving a graduate degree from Harvard and entering into law school in the fall, the 25-year-old Colorado native is under house arrest and charged with murder.   

The killing left the more than 100,000 residents of a rapidly changing city wondering whether it was an isolated incident or if larger social factors were at play.

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Since Harvard was founded in 1636, "town-versus-gown" tensions have frequently cropped up between Cambridge residents and students at Harvard University, MIT and other schools.

Rich Seviere, a Cambridge police crime analyst, said these tensions, however, have rarely turned to violence.

"A very low percentage of our arrestees are students," Seviere said. "And most of those are for shoplifting or an occassional bar fight."

Indeed, the last murder involving college students occurred in January 1990, when Mark Belmore, a Northeastern student, was stabbed to death.

That murder and the stabbings of Jesse McKie, 21, and Rigoberto Carrion, 31, just 10 days later led to a public outcry over rising violence in the city.

Crime rates have dropped since the late 1980s and early '90s, according to Cambridge Police Department crime reports. This drop in crime may have something to do with the local outrage about and national interest in the stabbing death of Michael Colono.

From different worlds

Local and national media have emphasized the class differences between the two young men, focusing particularly on Pring-Wilson's Harvard education.

He has been depicted as the privileged and brilliant only child of two Colorado attorneys, while Colono has been portrayed as a teenage father on probation for selling crack.

The victim grew up in a housing project "in the shadows of the hallowed halls of Harvard University," according to the Boston Herald, but was trying to turn his life around.

Harvard officials declined to comment on the case or the tension between the community and the university.

"[Pring-Wilson] is on a leave of absence," Harvard spokesman Bob Mitchell said. "That's all that can be said right now."

But Cambridge mayor Michael Sullivan acknowledged the persistent friction between the city's residents and its academicians.

"I grew up in the shadows of Harvard and there's still some tension there," Sullivan said.

Sullivan said he is closely watching the trial not only because he is a former Middlesex County assistant district attorney, but because he finds it relevant to problems he sees as mayor.

"I find it really hard to buy the whole 'town-versus-gown' issue," Sullivan said. "It's really more of an economic issue."

The problem is that Cambridge is rapidly becoming a place where many locals can no longer afford to live.

Outpriced at home

More than half of the city's land is owned by universities, which means less property tax revenue for municipal coffers and constant disputes over zoning and other issues.

Lifelong resident Carl Barron, 88, said that the prestigious schools do, however, help to fuel the local economy.

"The city of Cambridge without the university would be pretty low on an economic scale," he said.

According to U.S. Census Bureau statistics from 2000, Cambridge has the highest proportion of homes worth more than $1 million — which constitute about one out of eight homes in the 6.5-square-mile city.

Sullivan attributed the housing problem to an influx of high-paying tech jobs connected with research at Harvard and MIT, plus the loss of blue-collar jobs after several factories closed.

The economic shift has affected the sense of community for those who have lived in Cambridge all their lives.

"As my mother would say, we were all poor then but nobody knew it," Sullivan said.

In fact, the exodus of blue-collar jobs directly affected Michael Colono's family.

Colono's father, according to reports, had just lost his job as a machine operator at the Necco candy factory.

The familiar building on the Cambridge skyline is now being renovated and transformed into the global headquarters of the Novartis Institute of Biomedical Research.

Clash of cultures

While housing prices certainly had nothing to do with a drunken Pring-Wilson stabbing Michael Colono during an altercation outside a pizza parlor, the locals' resentment toward recent moneyed arrivals has been a factor in proceedings leading up to the trial.

Pring-Wilson's former attorney, Jeffrey Denner, asked for the murder trial to be moved to western Massachusetts because news coverage focusing on racial and economic differences between Colono and his client would prevent him from receiving a fair trial in Cambridge.

In court papers, Denner argued that news coverage of the incident has overwhelmingly "sensationalized the socioeconomic, class, racial and ethnic divisions which define the case — the wealthy, seemingly entitled, privileged, white, Harvard-educated, armed, intoxicated graduate student juxtaposed with the unarmed, blue collar, urban-dwelling, uneducated Hispanic young Cambridge father leaving behind his infant child and very vocal family."

Such coverage, Denner wrote, would, "prevent the selection of an impartial and unbiased jury."

Pring-Wilson's current attorney declined to comment on the case. The Colono family also declined to comment.

The implications of the motion were clear: Pring-Wilson's defense team feared that local jurors would come back with a verdict based not on the facts of the case, but on their long-standing resentment toward affluent Ivy Leaguers.

Middlesex Superior Court Judge Charles Grabau denied the motion. 

The trial is set to begin Monday. Pring-Wilson faces a mandatory life sentence without parole if convicted of first-degree murder.