A Suffolk County homicide prosecutor today urged a panel of jurors to use a murder defendant’s alleged admissions and “hold him to his words.”

JONATHAN SANDERS (D.O.B. 7/8/89) is charged with second-degree murder for the March 30, 2007, shooting death of 18-year-old Dwayne Graham as Graham rode a crowded MBTA bus near the intersection of Normandy and Washington streets.

“This case if anything shows you the limits of human perception,” Assistant District Attorney Mark Lee said. “We live in an ESPN world. Pause it. Replay it. But life doesn’t work that way, and life on the Route 23 bus definitely doesn’t work that way.”

Lee recounted the divergent descriptions given by teenage passengers of the gunman who fired from outside the bus and reminded jurors that “the last thing in the world they expected to see was a gunshot coming through the window.”

Instead, Lee said, the consistent theme came from somewhere else – the number of people to whom Sanders allegedly made incriminating statements in the aftermath of the Sanders’ shooting death or who overheard him making those statements. The first, a woman who allegedly heard Sanders speaking to another person in her home, told police what she’d heard within days of the shooting.

“Do you think she had any reason to know,” Lee asked, “that more than a year later three other people would say they heard him say the same thing?”

Sanders’ statements of responsibility to one man, Lee reminded jurors, was so specific that it even gave details about the victim’s affiliation with the Crown Path street gang and the .44 caliber handgun he used.

None of those details had been released to the public at the time that witness came forward, Lee said.

“You can hold him to his words,” Lee said. “Dwayne Graham’s destiny was sealed the day he took a bullet to the head. The defendant’s destiny was sealed the day – and the days following – when he told four people he had committed murder.”

Kara Hayes is the DA’s victim-witness advocate assigned to the case. Sanders is represented by attorney Peter Marano. Judge Regina Quinlan will instruct jurors on the law tomorrow morning in courtroom 808 of Suffolk Superior Court, after which deliberations will begin.