Friend testifies McInerney was ‘embarrassed and mad’ before student’s slaying

Keith L. knew the look on his buddy Brandon McInerney’s face that afternoon. He’d seen it many times on the basketball court during noon pickup games at E.O. Green Junior High in Oxnard.

When Larry King, a small effeminate boy, made a flirtatious comment to McInerney in a crowded hallway, Keith said his friend’s face tightened and turned red.

“That’s how he gets when he’s mad,” the 17-year-old boy, identified only by his first name and initial, testified Thursday at McInerney’s murder trial. “Both embarrassed and mad.”

McInerney continued on to his final class of the day, but afterward he joined up with Keith again. “He told me he was going to bring a gun to school the next day,” the tall, athletic teenager told the court.

Keith didn’t report the comment because he thought his friend was just blowing off steam. “I didn’t pay him any mind,” he told jurors. “I thought he didn’t mean it.”

McInerney was deadly serious. The next morning in a school computer lab, he sat behind King and shot him twice in the back of the head, killing him.

McInerney, 17, is being tried as an adult for first-degree murder with a hate crime allegation. Defense attorneys don’t dispute the killing but hope to persuade jurors that it was manslaughter because McInerney was provoked. The case was moved to Chatsworth from Ventura County because of heavy local media coverage.

Keith was among a number of students called to the witness stand Thursday to recount the escalating tensions between King, 15, and McInerney, then 14. The students, some with voices so small they had to be encouraged to speak up, began painting a fuller picture of both boys in a stream of anecdotes and details.

In the weeks before the Feb. 12, 2008, shooting, King had been wearing women’s high-heeled boots, makeup and accessories to school, students testified. This seemed to boost his confidence, they said, and he seemed happier.

But it also triggered the scorn of much of the male student body, who taunted King with homosexual slurs, tripped him or avoided contact with him, several students testified. King and McInerney, in particular, seemed to be at loggerheads.

Stormy S. shared a science class with both boys and witnessed them calling each other names on several occasions, she told the court. On the day before the shooting, they were clashing again, she said. When King got up to get a drink of water, McInerney told students at his table that he was going to do something “violent” to him, Stormy said.

It was right after that class that the boys passed in a hallway and King made a loud comment to McInerney. Keith said he heard only the word “baby.” In opening statements, prosecutor Maeve Fox had said testimony would show that King actually said, “I love you baby!” apparently in an attempt to goad McInerney.

Keith said McInerney was clearly humiliated at being the focus of King’s attentions. “He wasn’t expressive,” Keith said. “But I knew it bothered him.”

McInerney rarely talked about personal matters or his family, Keith said. He was a smart boy who could be goofy and was no hothead. Keith, who is black, said he never heard his friend make a racist comment or talk about white power. The prosecution is alleging that McInerney killed King in part because of white supremacist tenets that hold homosexuality as an abomination.

Keith said most of McInerney’s friends were black or Latino. Other students have testified the same.

Another student, Avery L., a close friend of King, said he would sometimes adopt a flirty behavior with boys because he knew they didn’t like it. “But only when someone else had started the argument,” she said.

catherine.saillant@latimes.com