Slayer of Girl, 17, Sentenced, Grins

After his arrest last year in the murder of a 17-year-old Westside girl, Glenn Martell confided to co-defendant Jederick Bond that he did not care whether he was set free or sent to prison, where he could watch television, listen to the radio and have plenty of food.

Martell, 20, continued to express his disdain Friday at his sentencing, grinning in front of the tearful parents of high school student Erica Johnson, as he and Bond, 19, were sentenced to maximum terms of 25 years to life in prison by Los Angeles Superior Court Judge William R. Pounders.

“He has no regrets for what he did, and he treats it as something light,” said Pounders, as the laughing Martell looked on. “He thinks nothing of it.”

Martell and Bond, both of Los Angeles, were convicted by a jury last September of the Feb. 28, 1985, shooting death of Erica, who had been subpoenaed earlier that day as a witness in an assault case against the alleged leader of the Playboy Gangster Crips, a Westside street gang. The two men knew Erica and lured her into a car before Bond shot her four times in the face.

Members of Gang

Testimony during the six-week trial showed that the pair, who were already members of a lesser-known gang, killed Erica in an effort to gain acceptance to the tougher Playboy Gangster Crips.

“They premeditated the killing to gain a reputation,” Pounders said. “The callousness and cruelty with which they carried this out shocked the court.”

Key evidence in the trial was a police tape recording, made secretly, of the two defendants discussing the killing while seated in a police car after their arrest.

Amid a plethora of expletives and street slang, Martell is heard to tell Bond that he hoped authorities would “let me go or let me go to the pen-(expletive deleted)-itentiary.”

“Goddamn . . . big TV, a big . . . radio and plenty of grub in that (penitentiary),” he is heard to say.

Later, Martell, a ninth-grade dropout who has told probation officers that he “thinks” he has three children, noted, “Cripping ain’t easy, man. It’s a hard . . . job.”

Defense attorneys had sought to exclude the tape as evidence and said they would appeal the conviction on the grounds that playing of the tape in court had deprived their clients of a fair trial.

At the brief sentencing hearing, the victim’s parents told Pounders of their ongoing grief and frustration.

“I’ve been to this trial quite a few times, and I’ve noticed the defendants as they come in, they take it as a joke,” said Benson Johnson, a retail store clerk. “To me, it’s very hard to accept. I can’t understand the look on their faces. I can’t understand how somebody can take another person’s life.”

Martell’s grin disappeared as Johnson spoke, but it re-emerged moments later when Johnson sat down. After the hearing, Johnson and his wife left the courtroom in tears.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Dennis Choate, who prosecuted the two men, said later that although he serves in the office’s hard-core gang unit, he had “never seen a case where they were so casual about killing somebody.”

“It’s one thing to not care, it’s another thing to laugh about it,” he said. “They literally laughed in the face of the probation officer; they laughed during the course of the trial. And Martell was laughing in court. We’ll see if they stop laughing when the bus stops at the prison gates to let them off.”