Gang Mom (19 page)

“Extremely unlikely,” Crannell testified, “to the point of absurd.”

“Why?”

“Because fourteen is too young, and a fourteen-year-old white boy being inducted into a black gang just stretches the imagination.”

“In other words, Beau Flynn as well as Mary Thompson were making up their connection to these gangs?”

“Yes.”

Skelton reached underneath the lectern for a paper cup filled with water. After taking a short draught, he continued.

“How does one come to control a set?”

“Control of a set comes from the territory claimed in its area, in other words, where gang members live and do business. Black gangs have territorial attitudes. Most others do not. The bottom line to a set is money.”

At the defense table, Mary nodded.

“If there is no money involved,” Cranell continued, “they could not care less about what the other sets do.”

“Would someone from Portland, as Mary Thompson claims, be sent to take care of a Eugenean?”

“Unless it has to do with money, they would not care. To say that Portland gangs were watching this matter in Lane County, and then would send someone to kill Aaron Iturra, sounds like someone making it up.”

Michaud smiled.

“Now what about this initiation, or jumping-in ceremony, with a stopwatch, the way Mary Thompson told her gang it was done?”

“Initiating someone in a ritualistic fashion probably would not happen, especially with a stopwatch. Nor is it a ritual to hand out do-rags afterwards to the newly initiated. I’ve never heard of it being done before, because as members become accepted, they just wear the rag, and it can be done even before they are really recognized as a true member of the gang. The jumping-in ceremony in Eugene was way more highly orchestrated than any I’ve ever seen or heard of in the past.”

“In other words, Mary Thompson was manipulating these kids toward her own ends?”

“Objection!”

“Sustained.”

“No further questions. Your witness.”

“Were the films
Boyz N the Hood
and
Colors
artistic interpretations of gangs?” Chez began.

“I guess. I’m not a movie critic.”

“Are gangs over-romanticized than they really are?”

“Well, I’m out there with the real thing every day and I have little time to go to the movies.”

“Wasn’t there some sort of mass media that dealt with a jumping-in?”

“Maybe a PBS special would have.”

“How about ‘Banging in Little Rock,’ an HBO documentary?”

“Didn’t see it.”

“Is there an excitement at being shot at or shooting at someone?”

“I’d say that there is quite an adrenaline rush.”

“Why do kids want to be
wannabes
, that is, pretend to be affiliated gang members?”

The implication was that the Eugene 74 Hoover Crips were not real gang members, and therefore not really that dangerous. Crannell would have none of that. He replied, “If kids are engaged in the same illegal, criminal activities, regardless of their affiliation, they are gang members.

“If you act like a gang member, claim you are a gang member, wear the clothing, do gang activities, then you are a gang member.”

Does the phrase, Walk like a duck, quack like a duck, etc., ring any bells
? Michaud thought.

“And if an activity, like murder, was done for the set, that would make it a gang crime,” Crannell continued.

“Are there any white Crip gang sets?” Chez wondered.

“Some in California,” Crannell replied.

At the defense table, Mary passed Chez a note. He looked at it.

“Is there a benefit to being a Crip over being a Blood?”

“No.”

Mary looked down, disappointed with the reply.

“How do gangs derive their income?”

“Selling crack cocaine is the main source of money. Prostitution takes too long to make money. Narcotics are the fastest way to do it. Robberies are another good source of revenue.”

Mary kept writing Chez notes. Apparently, the defense attorney was having trouble fathoming how gangs operated.

“Could we compare the West Coast gangs, the Bloods and Crips, to the Sharks and Jets of New York?”

Never mind that the Sharks and Jets were fictional, the names of the rival gangs in
West Side Story
. Crannell decided to give the question a serious reply to show how off the mark Chez really was.

“In the movie
West Side Story
, the Sharks and Jets used chains, knives and fists. The Bloods and Crips use
guns
—Uzis [Israeli-made machine pistols] and other types of automatic weapons that are far deadlier.”

“What about the Dalton Gang of the Old West?”

A strange non-sequitur. Had Chez checked his facts, he would have discovered that the Dalton Gang rode in broad daylight to commit robberies—they never shot anybody in the back of the head the way contemporary gangs did. The other major difference was that the Daltons’ reign of terror didn’t last very long, a mere few years. Modern gangs saw their lifespans in decades.

“Are we making too much out of gangs?” Chez asked.

“No, we need the pressure on them. Gangs commit major crimes,” Crannell testified.

“No further questions.” Chez sat down in frustration.

All his cross-examination did was bolster the prosecution’s case.

JUNE 26

“The state calls Lisa Fentress.”

Two years before, when the murder took place, Lisa Fentress had been an adolescent. Now, she was sixteen years old and looked older in a light-colored suit, with long dark hair to her shoulders, and piercing eyes. She strutted to the stand like she owned the place.

In a soft, calming voice, she recounted how she’d telephoned Aaron to make sure he was home, then phoned Mary to tell him he was, and then called Elstad. “I called Jim and told him Aaron was home and to go do it and page me when it was done,” she testified under direct examination. Her beeper had awakened her the next morning at 5 a.m. The digital display showed that she’d gotten a call from Mary the previous night at 1:40 a.m. She called Mary, who answered immediately. “She said that Aaron was taken care of. I asked if he was dead and she said, ‘Yes.’ She seemed happy.”

“Did you ever discuss killing Aaron Iturra at Mary Thompson’s home?”

“I recall sitting with Jim Elstad in Mary’s living room and talking about different ways to kill Aaron.”

“Was Mary Thompson in on those conversations?”

“She was always nearby, close enough to hear, if not participating.”

“Do you recall anything she might have said about killing Aaron, specifically a preferred method?”

“I remember her saying, ‘If you stab someone in the kidney, they’ll bleed to death and won’t be able to scream.’ She said that once she’d went over to Aaron’s house and hid in the bushes with a butcher knife, but wasn’t able to do anything because Aaron left with some friends.”

“Did she describe how she was dressed on that occasion?”

“She said she had on a hooded sweatshirt and Beau’s blue bandanna on her head.”

Skelton wanted to know why Elstad, once he agreed to do the killing, would actually go through with it.

“She reminded me that Jim had sworn on his set that he’d do it that weekend.” And, of course, he did.

“Why did you initially agree to set Aaron up, Lisa?”

“Well, I was angry with him. Aaron was a snitch. But it was mostly because it made Mary so unhappy what Aaron was going to do about testifying against Beau.” The last thing she wanted was for Mary, whom she idolized, to be unhappy.

“And did Mary reciprocate your feelings?”

“I thought Mary cared about me,” she said with sadness. At the defense table, Mary, too, looked like she would cry.

On cross-examination, Chez immediately went to work attacking Fentress’s credibility. “What kind of criminal background do you have, Ms. Fentress?”

Lisa admitted that she had bought a .22 caliber handgun from Mary for $65 in cash—a bargain in today’s market—and some marijuana. She had also sold knives and drugs, and engaged in burglary, scrawling gang graffiti and plotting Aaron’s death. It was a series of admissions designed to destroy her credibility as a witness. Then Chez went for the jugular.

“Did you make a deal with the prosecutor for your testimony?”

She said that yes she had, that in return for immunity from all charges arising out of Aaron’s death, she had agreed to testify against Mary. “But that’s not why I took the deal,” she continued. “Testifying is the least I owe Aaron’s family. I don’t care if I go to jail.”

Her testimony ended with tears as she buried her face in her hands and the judge recessed court for the day.

JUNE 27

“The state calls Larry Martin.”

Larry “Truth” Martin, nineteen years old, took the stand. Wearing a shirt and tie and wire-rimmed glasses, his hair neat and slicked back, he looked more like a “yuppie” than a gang member.

He proceeded to testify that he had assisted Mary in burning gang photos and gang-style poetry she had apparently written celebrating Aaron’s death. Mary told him “… not to put it in so fast because the flames [in her fireplace] were getting real big. She got scared the cops were going to search her house,” said “Truth” under oath. He also said that he had used drugs with Mary regularly, from late 1994 to early 1995, before she was arrested.

Before the murder, he had heard Mary say, “He needs to be dead.” She referred to Aaron with profane names in front of the kids who hung out in her place. She said that she wanted him “taken care of.”

“Did you intend to kill Aaron?” Skelton asked.

“I did. I said I’d take care of Iturra, meaning I’d kill him. I didn’t intend to go through with it, though, but figured it’d calm everybody down if they thought I was going to do it.”

He said that the .38 used to kill Aaron was the weapon that he, Brown and some friends had stolen from a trailer home the week before the killing, that the gun had passed through the hands of many members of the gang, till it finally resided in his possession. Jim Elstad came to his house and took the gun on October 2. After he used it to kill Aaron Iturra, Elstad offered it back, and “Truth” categorically answered, “No.”

Which made a lot of sense. What idiot would want to accept possession of a murder weapon after the fact?

Under cross-examination by Chez, Martin admitted that he was high on methamphetamine when he testified, falsely, to the grand jury, but that his testimony in court now was true and sober.

“Why should anyone believe your story now?” Chez asked.

“I’m out of that [gang] thinking. I’m done with everything that pertained to what happened in the past. I’m trying to go on with my future and have a better life.”

Truth did admit that he used drugs so heavily in the period before and after Aaron’s murder that his recollections were hazy. But, he added quickly, he stood by his current testimony. If it was a performance it was a good one.

“Are you sure it wasn’t house-cleaning?” Chez asked, referring to the burning of the gang poetry and such in Mary’s fireplace.

“I’m positive,” Truth answered. “It was kind of like a panic thing.”

Chez was improvising; Mary kept writing him notes during the cross-examination, from which Chez seemed to be drawing his questions.

“Do you blame Mary Thompson for your criminal past [that included breaking into cars and houses]?”

“No, I blame myself. But my friendship with Mary didn’t help. I was in trouble and I stayed in trouble. The trouble didn’t stop,” once he started hanging out with Mary. It escalated. He said that Thompson was a heavy drug user who smoked dope, snorted methamphetamine and popped pills.

“How do you feel about Mary Thompson now?” Skelton asked.

“I don’t like her and I don’t hate her. She’s just a person.”

Over the course of the next week, Skelton finished up his case. He had Ric Raynor testify about how Mary had, he maintained, gotten sucked into the gang life style, and how he’d warned her against the quicksand she found herself mired in, the quicksand of the power she had over the teenagers in her gang. Michaud testified about how the case was put together.

Jurors heard many of the taped calls between Mary and Joe Brown, then in custody, in which Brown responded to pressure from prosecutors to testify against Mary. “I’m going to tell them for the third time that I’m going to plead the Fifth because they won’t let me testify for you,” Brown told her during one of the conversations that Michaud and Rainey had listened in on.

“I don’t know what they expect you to tell them,” said Mary.

“I don’t know anything. I can’t remember anything,” responded Crazy Joe. “I didn’t do nothing wrong that I can think of, anyway.”

“I love you,” said Mary.

“I love
you
,” Joe responded.

On the calls, all collect to Mary’s house, Mary could be heard panicking over the continued police investigation, using profanity extensively to describe her continued persecution by police and, in particular, Michaud. Sometimes she would cry, sometimes she would be frightened, but always, always, she maintained that she had nothing to do with Aaron’s murder.

Maybe it was just a question of telling a lie long enough and you believe it
, Michaud thought.
Maybe she really doesn’t think she caused the kid’s death. Maybe she does have a conscience and she just couldn’t deal with it if it was true. And maybe my brain is rotting and I’m just full of it
.

Finally, on July 10, after five weeks of testimony, the state rested their case. Now, it was the defense’s turn.

FOURTEEN

Part of Steve Chez’s strategy for the defense was to use Joe Brown’s own words to clear Mary Thompson. But that became difficult when Brown, in refusing to testify, was cited for contempt. Chez was then forced to play for the jury Brown’s videotaped interview with cops at Aaron’s house four days after the crime, when he reenacted the murder. In the tape, Brown says that, while Mary Thompson said that “she’d really love to see Iturra dead,” he interpreted her words to mean that someone should “put the fear of God” into Aaron. It was left for the jury to determine what that meant.