‘I Can’t Stand This Anymore’ : An emotional father tells at son’s murder trial about their tortured confrontations over the son’s sexuality.

The father of a 19-year-old Calabasas man accused of killing a 17-year-old schoolmate who exposed him as a homosexual repeatedly broke down on the stand Thursday as he described an angry confrontation over his son’s homosexuality less than a week before the killing.

“All of a sudden, I switched to being a lawyer instead of his father and I decided to cross-examine him and make him tell me the truth,” Herbert Rosenkrantz, who is an attorney, testified. “I said, ‘I know you’re covering up. I want names, addresses’ ” of lovers, he testified.

Rosenkrantz’s son, Robert, who turned 19 Thursday, is on trial before Judge James A. Albracht in Van Nuys Superior Court, accused of first-degree murder in the death of Steven Redman, who was shot 10 times on a Calabasas street with an Uzi carbine last June. The shooting took place after Rosenkrantz’s brother, Joey, then 16, and Redman, Joey’s best friend, spied on Robert and exposed him as a homosexual.

The older Rosenkrantz testified that he was unaware that his son was a homosexual until Redman told him so on the night of Robert’s high school graduation.

Robert had said he was going with a girlfriend to the Rosenkrantz beach house in Hermosa Beach and asked not to be disturbed, Rosenkrantz testified. Late that night, Rosenkrantz was awakened by a call from Joey, who said he needed a ride home from the beach house because Robert had taken his car keys, the father testified.

At the beach house, he found Joey too upset to talk. But he said Redman told him: “Mr. Rosenkrantz, I’ve got to tell you something. Your son’s a homosexual. We caught them with their pants down.”

‘Don’t Worry,’ Son Told Him

The next day, Rosenkrantz said, his son denied the allegation. “That’s the most disgusting thing anybody’s ever said to me,” Rosenkrantz quoted his son as responding. “He put his arm around me. He said, ‘Don’t worry. You’ll have lots of grandchildren.’

“I said, ‘I’m not worried about grandchildren. I’m worried about a life style so alien, it will be horrible . . . . I’m worried about AIDS,’ ” Rosenkrantz said.

Robert Rosenkrantz buried his head in his hands and sobbed as his father testified.

When Joey also contradicted Redman’s accusation, “I broke down and said, ‘Thank God. I thought I had lost my son,’ ” Rosenkrantz testified. But, after thinking it over, he testified, “I went to Joey and said, ‘I can’t stand this anymore. You have to tell me the truth. What’s going on?’ ”

He said Joey then told him that he and Steven had broken into the beach house where Robert was entertaining a male lover. He told his father that a fight broke out and that Redman broke Robert’s nose and Robert shocked Joey repeatedly in the face with an electric stun device.

Rosenkrantz said Joey asked him to listen to a tape recording he made of Robert speaking on the phone with a male lover. Rosenkrantz said he made his son destroy the tape.

That night, Rosenkrantz said, he heard his son, in a conversation with Mrs. Rosenkrantz, again deny that he was a homosexual. “I couldn’t stand listening to it anymore,” he said. “I followed him down the hall to his room, yelling at him,” demanding to know the names of his lovers.

“I never saw him again until he was arrested. When I awoke the next day, Rob was gone, his stuff was gone, his clothing was gone,” the father said. “The next thing I heard from him was after I learned that Steven Redman had been killed and my son was a suspect.”