14-Year-Old Pleads Guilty to Killing Elderly Neighbor

With his mother seated beside him, James McClure, a 14-year-old East San Diego boy, admitted in a choking voice that he killed an elderly neighbor last year by stabbing him once in the chest.

McClure pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in San Diego Juvenile Court on Monday in a plea bargain that reduced the charge against him from first-degree murder.

He could be sentenced next month to custody in the California Youth Authority until his 25th birthday. Because he is under 16, McClure could not be tried as an adult.

The boy--who was 12 at the time of the May 7, 1985, stabbing--told Superior Court Judge Norbert Ehrenfreund that he had a kitchen knife in his pocket when he went into 80-year-old Thick Lew’s house intending to steal something.

Surprised and frightened to find the man at home, McClure said, he pulled the knife from his pocket and stabbed Lew.

With Ehrenfreund’s permission, the boy’s mother, Jean, sat beside him as he recited his admission of guilt. She told the judge she concurred in his guilty plea.

Prosecution and defense lawyers had hotly debated the admissibility of McClure’s earlier confessions to the crime.

Ehrenfreund ruled in May that the youth’s admission to the offense in an interview with homicide detectives could not be used against him because an officer told McClure he wouldn’t get in trouble for talking with police.

But the judge ruled that prosecutors could employ the testimony of a Florida girl who said McClure described the crime to her while they both were in a Florida juvenile detention center last year.