(02-07) 04:00 PST Clearlake, Lake County -- The green and beige home on 11th Street is empty now. It's been that way since early December, when it stopped being a dwelling and turned into a crime scene.
However, two signs still hang from a big tree in the yard: "Private Property Keep Out" and "This house guarded by a shotgun three nights per week. You guess which three."
They were put up months before the carnage of Dec. 7, and they remain intact -- mute witnesses to what started out as an alleged home invasion and ended up with two men dead. A preliminary hearing on the killings is expected to conclude today.
Whatever the outcome, one thing is already clear: The potential death penalty case is ravaging several families.
"My life has been ruined by this whole situation, and I can barely provide food for my family," testified Shannon Edmonds, 31, who admitted to gunning down two of the men who broke into his house but hasn't been charged.
"It's very unreal," said Judy Hughes, whose son, Renato Hughes Jr. -- in an unusual invocation of a complex "vicarious murder" legal theory -- is being accused of slaying his boyhood chums, Rashad Williams and Christian Foster.
"It's like a bad, bad dream," said Hughes, a San Francisco schoolteacher. "I can't see my child going down for this."
"If there's a living nightmare, this is it," said Deborah Besley, grandmother of Dale Lafferty, 17, who was badly beaten with a baseball bat during the melee.
"There are questions I need to have answered. I can't bring closure to my son's death when they have incarcerated my son's best friend," said Sheila Burton, the mother of Williams, who gained national acclaim as a 15-year-old after he ran in the Bay to Breakers to raise $40,000 for Lance Kirklin -- wounded during the 1999 bloodbath at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo.
Williams, facing a three-year prison sentence for unarmed bank robberies in Danville and Lafayette last year, had been staying with his grandparents in Clearlake since April. On Dec. 7, just after midnight, Hughes and Foster arrived for a visit.
The preliminary hearing to determine whether Hughes will go on trial began Jan. 11 and will enter its sixth day today. Testimony has been contradictory and confusing.
According to prosecutor Jon Hopkins, the chief deputy district attorney in Lake County, at some point after 4 a.m., Hughes, Williams and Foster broke into the home where Edmonds was living with his young daughter, fiancee Lori Tyler, her son Dale Lafferty, and an unrelated teen, 16-year-old Justin Sutch. Hopkins maintains the three wanted to steal the medical marijuana used by the unemployed Edmonds, a former tractor mechanic, to combat depression. Police later seized at least 5 pounds from the house.
A free-for-all erupted, according to police, in which one intruder wrestled with Edmonds, one hit Tyler, and another bashed Lafferty with a bat. Edmonds grabbed his 9mm semiautomatic Browning and shot Williams twice in the back and Foster five times. It hasn't been established whether the shooting began indoors or outside.
When police got there, Williams was lying in the middle of 11th Street, dead, and Foster was dying in bushes 20 yards away.
The Lake County district attorney hasn't determined whether Edmonds has any criminal liability, but it has charged Mission High graduate Hughes, a 21-year-old clerk at a Trader Joe's in San Francisco, with two counts of first-degree murder and one count each of attempted murder, robbery, assault with a deadly weapon and residential burglary.
Hopkins is relying on a controversial legal theory called the provocative act murder doctrine, which originated in 1965 and has been used mainly to convict gang members in Southern California -- drive-by shootings are a classic application. The doctrine says that someone who provokes another person to kill can be charged with murder.
"It creates an unusual situation in which the defendant who did not actually kill anyone can receive the death penalty," defense attorney Angela Carter said.
Her husband, co-defense attorney Stephen Carter, said that it's unclear whether Edmonds' place was invaded, whether a robbery occurred, or whether the three were merely hoping to buy marijuana -- and that no evidence indicates Hughes was even in the house.
He also pointed to racially tinged tensions between Edmonds' family and two black teenage neighbors who had issued threats, which were reported to the police, shortly before the events of Dec. 7. And he noted that Edmonds had smoked marijuana as well as taking Lexapro, an anti-depressant, and Neurontin, a drug to control seizures, Dec. 6.
"When you shoot someone who is fleeing, it's not self-defense," Stephen Carter said. "It's an execution."
In court papers, he argued that the provocative act theory shouldn't be invoked.
"The ruthless, ill-motivated pursuit and killing of Mr. Williams and Mr. Foster by an individual engaged in illegal drug sales while under the influence of mood-altering drugs cannot be said to be a proximate, foreseeable and/or natural consequence of any acts allegedly engaged in by Mr. Hughes," Carter wrote.
As the intermittent court proceedings drag on, the families of those involved are struggling with grief, rage and fear -- and crisscrossing Northern California. Their lives often intersect in Clearlake.
Brisbane resident Burton and Judy Hughes, who is her longtime friend, have attended all five days of the hearing, a round trip of at least four hours. Lafferty's grandfather, Frank Kester -- the father of Lori Tyler -- is always there, too. His drive from Shasta County takes several hours each way, and sometimes he sleeps in his vehicle.
Howard Foster and his wife came one day from San Francisco. They locked their fingers together in the courtroom as they heard how their son, Christian -- a 22-year-old student at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont -- had died across the street from Edmonds' now-vacant house.
Last week, observers from the Lake County chapter of the NAACP showed up. And Burton said she sometimes wonders whether she'll "have to pull Johnnie Cochran from his grave" to get justice in a city that is 76 percent white and 5 percent black.
Conservative Web sites, meanwhile, draw people who applaud what Edmonds did. One posting on freerepublic.com said, "Two out of three ain't bad."
Even though the case has acquired racial overtones, Besley insists that her grandson, who had scuffled with the two black teenagers in his neighborhood, is not biased.
"I'm married to a black man," said Besley, mother of Gary Lafferty, Dale's father.
She visited her grandson recently in the rehabilitation center at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose, 3 1/2 hours from her home in the Mendocino County town of Willits.
"He's not eating, he's not talking, and he's in a restless, agitated state right now," said Besley, a home health and hospice nurse.
Lafferty's prognosis is murky. Blows from the bat caused his brain to swell, and he was in an induced coma for weeks as doctors removed part of his skull and frontal lobe. The 6-foot-4 junior at Lower Lake High School has lost 25 pounds and is fed through a tube in his stomach.
"Dale was a sweetheart," Besley said. "He was a little bit of a thrill-seeker. He loved being out on the water on a boat, being a daredevil pulled by a tube. And he loved riding motorcycles."
Like Rashad Williams, she said, Lafferty had big feet and was on his school's track team.
"On Dec. 27, I kept saying I was waiting for my hug from Dale for my birthday," Besley recalled. "The therapist picked up his arm and put it around my neck. ... It's heartbreaking. You live through the sadness, the numbness, the grieving. You live through the not knowing and constantly wondering. We want Dale back the way Dale was."
E-mail Patricia Yollin at
[email protected].
