Gay student's slaying: Defense rests in murder trial

Seven weeks after the start of his murder trial for the fatal shooting of a 15-year-old gay classmate, Brandon McInerney turned down his chance to testify.

Defense lawyers rested their case Monday without calling to the witness stand the youth who killed fellow eighth-grader Larry King before two dozen horrified classmates and a teacher at E.O. Green Junior High in Oxnard. 

Defense attorney Scott Wippert told the court that McInerney, now 17, made the choice not to testify.

At the time of the 2008 shooting, King had started dressing in women’s clothes, wearing makeup and making what McInerney construed as taunting sexual remarks.

The defense contends that McInerney entered into a “dissociative state” and was driven to a sudden irrational act by a violent upbringing and by what he felt as sexual harassment by King. Defense lawyers are asking that the jury be allowed to consider a charge of voluntary manslaughter instead of murder.

The trial was moved from Ventura County to Chatsworth because of intense publicity. 

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-- Steve Chawkins

Photo: Brian McInerney