Testimony in Calabasas Killing : Victim ‘Worthless,’ Accused Is Quoted

An 18-year-old Calabasas youth accused of killing a 17-year-old schoolmate who exposed him as a homosexual allegedly called a sheriff’s station hours after the killing and said of his victim:

“He was a worthless kid so don’t feel too bad about it.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Larry Diamond said Wednesday in Van Nuys Superior Court that Robert M. Rosenkrantz made the comment “without a trace of remorse” in a taped June 28 telephone conversation, hours after Rosenkrantz shot Steven Redman 10 times with an Uzi semiautomatic weapon on a Calabasas street.

Rosenkrantz is on trial before Superior Court Judge James A. Albracht, charged with first-degree murder in Redman’s death.

“I had so much anger. That was the only way I could let it out because nobody could (obscenity) with me like that and get away with it. . . . He paid the price,” Diamond quoted Rosenkrantz as telling Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Herbert Wielkie. Wielkie, who has since retired from the department, taught Rosenkrantz in a class on the criminal justice system at Calabasas High School, from which Rosenkrantz graduated a week before the killing.

Diamond asserted that Rosenkrantz “made a deliberate, premeditated decision” to kill Redman and also to kill his brother, Joey Rosenkrantz, 17, who described himself as Redman’s best friend.

“Fortunately, I could not bring myself to do anything to my brother,” Diamond quoted Rosenkrantz as saying on the tape, which was made when Rosenkrantz called Wielkie on one of several phone lines that are routinely taped at the Sheriff’s Department.

Rosenkrantz’s attorney, Richard Plotin, argued that Rosenkrantz should be found guilty only of manslaughter because, he said, the youth killed Redman “in a sudden quarrel in the heat of passion.”

He said Rosenkrantz had kept his homosexuality a secret for fear he would be “ridiculed, shunned and beaten,” and that he was a victim of “a surprise attack of the most devastating kind that tore that secret from Robert. . . .”

Joey Rosenkrantz, who was 16 at the time of the killing, testified that he and Redman began surreptitiously taping the older Rosenkrantz’s telephone calls in early June. They were “just playing around,” he testified, but they heard conversations that led them to suspect that the older youth was a homosexual.

Joey Rosenkrantz said he wanted to uncover proof that his brother was homosexual so that he could blackmail him and make him “leave me alone. He used to bother me, humiliate me . . . fight with me in front of my friends. He treated me kind of rotten.”

‘Final Punch Back’

The younger Rosenkrantz said his brother once threw him in the mud “in front of people” after Joey Rosenkrantz balked at driving him to school, and added: “He used to threaten to make me cry in front of my friends.”

Spying on Robert was “kind of the final punch back at him that I’ve never done before because I’ve been taking it all from him,” he said.

Joey Rosenkrantz said he and Redman followed the older Rosenkrantz to the family’s Hermosa Beach oceanfront condominium on June 21, the night of Robert Rosenkrantz’s high school graduation. For an hour, they stood outside a first-floor window, peering into a dimly lit room, where, he said, Robert Rosenkrantz, three other men and a woman were watching television and drinking. Then, Joey Rosenkrantz testified, he saw his brother apparently kiss one of the men, and saw the two men go into a bedroom.

Kicked In Door

“We snuck around to the window by the bedroom. We made a noise by accident so we ran to leave,” Joey Rosenkrantz testified. But, he said, Redman talked him in to bursting into the house with a camera in hopes of getting compromising pictures.

Armed with an electric stun device, Joey Rosenkrantz unlocked the door and Redman kicked it open, yelling, “Get the (obscenity) out of here, you faggots,” the younger Rosenkrantz testified.

Joey Rosenkrantz said he told his brother that he would not tell his parents, but that his brother yelled, “You’re not getting out of here.” He said they got into a fight during which Redman broke Robert Rosenkrantz’s nose with a flashlight, and Robert Rosenkrantz shot Joey with an electrical stun gun in the face as he screamed with pain.

Joey Rosenkrantz testified that he nearly lost consciousness before his brother stopped.

Following his testimony, Joey’s father, who was waiting outside the courtroom, embraced him for a full minute.