Grocer Saw Molestations, Child Testifies

The owner of a market where McMartin Pre-School students allegedly were molested by their teachers watched as “naked games” were played in his storeroom, a 10-year-old boy testified Wednesday.

The boy said the owner of Harry’s Market in Manhattan Beach, Rasheed (Ray) Fadel, watched the students and teachers from the nursery school playing “tickle” and the “naked movie star” games, which he has said were played with the children naked.

Earlier this week, the boy said he did not remember whether the owner was in the storeroom, but said he saw the man talking to the defendants after the games were played.

“That’s completely not true,” Fadel told United Press International. “Why they are putting this on me, I don’t know.”

He said he knew only one of the McMartin defendants slightly, as a customer, and insisted that he had no involvement with any of the molestations.

During most of the day’s proceedings, an attorney for one of seven preschool teachers accused of molesting dozens of youngsters sought to discredit the young witness by pressing him for details of strange church rituals and animal slaughters he has described.

The boy, the second child witness to testify in the lengthy preliminary hearing, testified that strangers in black robes, some wearing devil masks, danced in a circle in a candle-lit church before rabbits were killed in front of children.

Defense attorney Brad Brunon quizzed the boy, known as John Doe No. 9, about what he called “the bizarre and incredible” killing of rabbits.

Brunon has argued that the incidents described by the child during his six days of testimony, including the cutting up of a pony to scare the youngsters into silence, logically could not have taken place and were a product of the boy’s imagination.

The boy said Raymond Buckey, 26, the main defendant in the case, cut up rabbits on a church altar, then told the children, “This will happen to you if you tell anyone our secrets.”

Brunon showed photographs of the St. Cross Episcopal Church in suburban Hermosa Beach to the boy, who identified it as the place to which he had gone with the McMartin teachers and later with his mother after the allegations came to light.

Describing what happened at the church, the boy said, “Ray went outside somewhere and came back in with a rabbit” that he watched being slaughtered from about 15 feet away.

The hearing was frequently interrupted by prosecutor Christine Johnston.

She pointed out to Municipal Judge Aviva K. Bobb that her direct questioning took only 90 minutes while two defense attorneys have spent nearly six days questioning the boy, the second of 41 children scheduled to testify in the case. Five more defense attorneys are waiting to question him.