Racial Issues Arise as Jury Gets Murder Case : Nearly All-White Panel Mulls Whether Black Killed White Huntington Beach Shopowner

A jury of 11 whites and one black in Westminster Thursday afternoon began deliberating the fate of Zachary F. Pettus, 20, charged with first-degree murder in the stabbing and strangulation death of Darleen Hazboun, 37, in Huntington Beach.

The issues of racial attitudes and police conduct surfaced again in closing defense remarks Wednesday and Thursday, as they have since the trial began five months ago.

Pettus, a black high school dropout, is accused of killing the white boutique owner in the course of an October, 1983, robbery at the Harbor Landing Shopping Center, a special circumstance that could bring the death penalty under the state’s felony murder rule.

Superior Court Judge Leonard McBride, acknowledging the unique problems in trying a black defendant in a capital case in a county that is only 1.3% black, last fall agreed to a motion by Pettus’ court-appointed lawyers, Milton Grimes of Santa Ana and Marne Glass of Cypress, to reject the first jury pool in which there were only two blacks. That pool was drawn from the West Municipal Court District.

However, a second pool, drawn from the entire county, also produced only two prospective black jurors for the panel, which resumes deliberations today.

Citing the small number of blacks on the county’s voter registration rolls and Department of Motor Vehicle driving license lists --the bases for drawing prospective jurors--the defense attorneys, who are black, then sought unsuccessfully to have Judge McBride convene a pool that was 7.5% black, reflecting California’s black population, or to move the trial to a county with a larger black population.

‘Only Black Man’ In his closing remarks on Thursday, Grimes recalled that several of the 75 witnesses in the trial had said that Pettus had been “the only black man they saw at Harbor Landing” the day before and the day of the killing. However, Grimes said, there were a number of black men in the area of Hazboun’s boutique, called Somewhere in Time, during that period.

“This wasn’t some part of the South where blacks couldn’t go. This was Orange County,” Grimes said.

The defense attorney read to the panel standard jury instructions dealing with the evaluation of eyewitness testimony when the witness is of a different race from the accused, urging them to consider whether any “bias or prejudice” existed.

Over more than four hours, Grimes also worked to pick apart the extensive net of circumstantial evidence presented by the prosecution: that jewelry belonging to the victim was found in Pettus’ apartment, cash was found in the pocket of a jacket in a closet and his fingerprint was found on a file cabinet behind the boutique counter.

Grimes repeated his challenges to the fingerprint identification and raised the possibility that the jewelry, which was not discovered by police on their first two searches of Pettus’ apartment, had been planted there. The $45 found in his client’s clothing, he said, may have belonged to his older brother, Carlous. At various times, Grimes charged, the police tainted the identification process by carelessness and technical mistakes.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Patrick Geary, who did not respond to the defense remarks about race, did acknowledge that “there were errors made” by investigators.

But Geary said Pettus was in court “not because there’s some conspiracy on the part of the police.” It was “not just coincidence, not just bad luck” that brought the young man to the courtroom, the prosecutor said.

Geary went over eyewitness accounts placing Pettus at or near the boutique, as well as the testimony of Darcy Belvin, a former classmate of Pettus at Marina High School in Huntington Beach, where Pettus had lived for three months with his sister.

Belvin testified that she had seen Pettus on Oct. 18, 1983, the day before the killing and the day after he had withdrawn from school, and that he told her that he was “thinking of pulling a job,” a robbery.

Pettus, Geary said, “has been lying ever since the police arrested him.”

The jury, Geary said, should not be swayed by the fact that the defendant, who has no previous criminal record, “does not fit the stereotype of what someone like this should be.”

Pettus committed a brutal crime, Geary said, and “coolly” walked away from the scene, smiling and waving to witnesses in nearby stores.

Sitting in the first row of the courtroom was Pettus’ father, Willie, a Cincinnati, Ohio, maintenance mechanic, who frequently dabbed his eyes with a handkerchief during Grimes’ remarks. Next to him was his son, Carlous, a West Point graduate now working as a salesman for a California-based pharmaceutical company