Spring Valley

Witnesses in the preliminary hearing for three men charged in the slaying of sheriff’s trainee Kelly Bazer pieced together Thursday the trail her alleged assailants left in making their getaway from the Spring Valley shooting site.

The son of a man who witnessed the shooting told Municipal Court Judge Robert Stahl that he heard what sounded like a gunshot shortly after 7 p.m. on Jan. 13 while he was in his garage.

Stahl must decide at the end of the hearing, which continues today, whether Southeast San Diego residents Jesse Stuart, 19; Ronnie Williams, 20, and Prentice Byrd, 19, should stand trial for auto theft, murder and a robbery of the Safeway store across the street from the shooting site.

Michael Foxhoven Jr. said he walked to the garage door and saw Bazer’s car speeding down St. George Street toward Sweetwater Road. A few seconds later, while the Mustang was still in sight, a red Toyota pickup truck came speeding around the corner and followed the Mustang out of his sight, he said.

A previous witness, Edward Mosley, has testified that he found Bazer’s abandoned car a couple of blocks from the shooting with the engine still running. He said he also found a wrapped bundle of money near the car.

U.S. Border Patrol Agent Kevin Rudd testified that he became suspicious of a red Toyota pickup that pulled up next to his marked Border Patrol truck about 7:30 that night at a stoplight where Sweetwater Road intersects the South Bay Freeway.

“As it approached, I heard yelling. Someone said, ‘Stay down, stay down, it’s the law,’ ” Rudd said. “Then as it pulled even with me there was silence.”

Rudd said those comments made him suspect the driver of smuggling illegal aliens, and he saw someone lying face down in the open truck bed.

When Rudd signaled the driver to pull over, the truck sped up and led the agent on a chase that ended with the pickup skidding to a stop on a dirt portion of Proctor Valley Road in Bonita.

He said two people got out of the truck and ran into the nearby field, where agents and other authorities began tracking the men. Authorities took the three defendants into custody after an all-night manhunt, during which the defendants were found hiding in various parts of the area near where the pickup was abandoned.

Several witnesses have identified Stuart as one of the two holdup men at Safeway, but none have identified his accomplice. Laura Smith, a clerk at the K mart next door to the supermarket, testified that three black men spent more than an hour just looking through the store before leaving about 7 p.m.

Before they left, however, she said one of them told another: “Come on Jesse, let’s get out of here.”

But when the defendants, who sat out of view behind portable chalkboards all day, were brought before her, Smith couldn’t identify any of them.