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Alexis P. Suter Ministers of Sound celebrate live CD with Kirby Center show

Wilkes-Barre Township children are invited to a Christmas party

<p>WILKES-BARRE &#8212; Accused murderer Eleazar Yisrael took the stand Monday and attempted to debunk six days worth of evidence piled on by county prosecutors, but was met with stinging questioning on his &#8220;cockamamie&#8221; explanations during a back-and-forth cross-examination.</p><p>Prosecutors allege Yisrael, 31, of Hazleton, shot 52-year-old Samuel Vacante in the back inside his Drums home on Aug. 31, 2015, then placed the father of two&#8217;s body in the trunk of his 2014 Kia Cadenza and drove it to Penn Forest Township in Carbon County, where he dumped the corpse in a clearing.</p><p>Following Yisrael&#8217;s questioning by his attorney, Allyson Kacmarski, Luzerne County Assistant District Attorney Dan Zola stood up and immediately cut into Yisrael, asking the homicide suspect whether &#8220;you expect (the jury) to believe that this is just a coincidence?&#8221;</p><p>&#8220;I expect them to believe the truth,&#8221; Yisrael responded.</p><p>The truth, Zola argued, was &#8220;on Aug. 31, (2015), when you went 22 hours silent on your cell phone, it was because you were going down to 20 Coventry Road to kill Samuel Vacante,&#8221; Zola said. &#8220;That&#8217;s the truth.&#8221;</p><p>Yisrael had the benefit of sitting through a week&#8217;s worth of testimony so he could &#8220;go over it in your mind and come up with a cockamamie story, trying to explain away every piece of evidence,&#8221; Zola said.</p><p>Yisrael, throughout Zola&#8217;s questioning, repeadedly maintained his innocence, at one point challenging investigators&#8217; competency.</p><p>&#8220;It actually seems as though you weren&#8217;t so certain I was the one who did something. If you were, you would have had more thorough investigations. If you weren&#8217;t so sure of yourself, you probably would have had who did it,&#8221; Yisrael said.</p><p>He later added: &#8220;I don&#8217;t believe there&#8217;s any evidence against me.&#8221;</p><p>Yisrael testified the white Kia, a focal point of prosecutors&#8217; case over the course of the trial, belonged to Jamal Reid. Reid, a friend of Yisrael&#8217;s who testified last week, was selling the car and invited Yisrael to a hotel the day before Vacante&#8217;s murder to look at it.</p><p>&#8220;He knows I buy cars,&#8221; Yisrael said. &#8220;I said might be interested.&#8221;</p><p>Yisrael testified he took the car to Choice Gas Station in Blakeslee to put fuel in it following a test drive. He got behind the wheel a second time after Reid asked him to drive Wilson Rosenbert to Walmart in Bloomsburg the next day. Jurors had been shown surveillance footage of Yisrael in a white sedan at both locations.</p><p>Asked by Zola if he was suggesting Reid set him up, Yisrael declined to &#8220;speculate.&#8221;</p><p>Yisrael&#8217;s testimony came after prosecutors, who called more than 40 witnesses and presented 431 exhibits over the course of the trial, rested their case. The alleged killer was the only witness called by the defense, who rested following his testimony. The case is expected to go to the jury following closing arguments Tuesday.</p><p>Earlier Monday, jurors heard a state police investigator&#8217;s testimony that slang used dozens of times in Yisrael&#8217;s past text messages matched a group message sent from Samuel Vacante&#8217;s phone hours after Yisrael allegedly gunned him down.</p><p>Pennsylvania State Police Cpl. Shawn Williams centered his testimony largely around a group text message sent from Samuel Vacante&#8217;s phone the day of his murder.</p><p>Later that night, many of Vacante&#8217;s cell phone contacts, including his estranged wife, Lisa Vacante, son, Brandon Vacante, and girlfriend, Jennifer Daley, received a text message from Samuel Vacante&#8217;s phone ordering many of his worldly possessions be left to Lisa Vacante.</p><p>One of those items, the couple&#8217;s marital home at 20 Coventry Lane in Drums, was allegedly at issue between the pair, who were in the final stages of a divorce, according to prosecutors. Samuel Vacante wanted to sell the home but Lisa Vacante didn&#8217;t, according to testimony. She denied the claim during her testimony Friday.</p><p>Daley, Lisa Vacante, and the husband and wife&#8217;s son, Brandon Vacante, have each testified over the course of the trial that the message was unlike any they&#8217;d received from Samuel Vacante because of the style in which it was composed. One oddity, prosecutors noted, was the use of the word &#8220;yu,&#8221; slang for &#8220;you.&#8221;</p><p>Williams said investigators, who searched through two months of Yisrael&#8217;s phone records and more than two years of Samuel Vacante&#8217;s leading up to the murder, found only one use of the slang on Samuel Vacante&#8217;s phone &#8212; the group message sent from his phone after he was killed.</p><p>More than 160 uses were found on Yisrael&#8217;s, Williams said. He said he concluded &#8220;Sam&#8217;s phone was not being utilized by Sam. The defendant would have been using Sam&#8217;s phone at the time the group text went out.&#8221;</p><p>Trooper Patrick Dawe also testified that surveillance video taken from Lisa Vacante&#8217;s place of employment showed she was at work during her estranged husband&#8217;s murder.</p><style>
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<div class="neCaption">Yisrael </div></div><div class="metaInfo"><photo0>https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/web1_Yisrael_Eleazar_toned-13.jpg</photo0><caption0>Yisrael </caption0><photoCredit0></photoCredit0></div></div>
<div class="metaInfo"><bylineMeta><p>By Joe Dolinsky</p><p>jdolinsky@www.timesleader.com</p></bylineMeta></div><div class="metaInfo"><shirttailMeta><p>Reach Joe Dolinsky at 570-991-6110 or on Twitter @JoeDolinskyTL</p></shirttailMeta></div>

Murder suspect Eleazar Yisrael takes stand; defense rests case