To hear prosecutors tell it, the Oyster Bay event promoter on trial for a manslaughter charge could have run away from the "raging mob" outside a Manhattan ax-throwing club in 2023 but instead "escalated the violence" when he took out a knife and fatally stabbed a New Jersey teenager in the heart.

Gianluca Bordone, who took the stand in his own defense, had testified that he could have fled when he encountered 17-year-old Rocco Rodden, of Warren, New Jersey, Manhattan prosecutor Alfred Peterson told jurors Wednesday in his closing arguments. He called it "some of the most powerful pieces of testimony."

But the defense attorney for Bordone, in his summation, also pointed the jury back to his client's dramatic testimony: Bordone told jurors he thought that members of a drunken mob that was

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