Son Portrayed as Both Killer, Victim of Father

The son of a Filipino newspaper executive, charged with shooting his father to death, was portrayed by attorneys Thursday both as a coldblooded murderer who attempted to disguise the killing as a political assassination and as a frightened child who could no longer endure his father’s violent abuse.

With the defendant’s mother and grandmother looking on, Deputy Dist. Atty. Susan Wondries told a jury in Pasadena Superior Court that 20-year-old Arnel Salvatierra had long planned to kill his father, Oscar Salvatierra, and finally did so the morning of Feb. 19, 1986, in their Glendale home.

The killing became national news because the elder Salvatierra had received a death threat a day earlier denouncing him for his involvement with the opposition to then-President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines.

In the hours after the body was found, Filipinos who opposed Marcos hailed Oscar Salvatierra as a martyr, the victim of a politically motivated killing.

But police and the FBI uncovered no evidence to support that theory, and 2 days after the murder, Arnel Salvatierra, then 17, was arrested on suspicion of murder.

His girlfriend, Teressa Kay Deburger, then 18, was arrested the same day and charged as an accessory after the fact. She is accused of returning the handgun used by Arnel Salvatierra to the home of a friend. Deburger’s trial is pending.

In her opening statement Thursday, Wondries said she will show that the younger Salvatierra was the author of the death-threat letter. She said that witnesses called by the prosecution will testify that on the morning of the shooting, the younger Salvatierra got a friend to drive him home after his first class at Glendale High School and that the friend waited outside, not knowing what was happening, while Arnel Salvatierra went inside and shot his father, who lay in bed.

Testimony of Friends

Arnel Salvatierra then changed clothes, Wondries said, and calmly returned to school. Wondries said that former friends of Arnel Salvatierra will testify that he later admitted killing his father with a borrowed handgun.

In contrast, defense attorney Marcia Morrissey characterized Arnel Salvatierra as someone who had been physically abused by his father since infancy. She likened life inside the Salvatierra house to that of a prison and said that Oscar Salvatierra regularly tortured his wife and four children.

Morrissey said that Oscar Salvatierra subjected his children to “ritualized beatings” in which he would assemble and whip them in proportion to their age, and that he told his wife that if she ever left him, he would kill her.

The frequency of Oscar Salvatierra’s attacks increased in 1985, Morrissey said, when the elder Salvatierra experienced financial pressures and grew worried about the political uncertainty in the Philippines.

Morrissey told the jury that in the summer of that year, Oscar Salvatierra bought a shotgun and began threatening to “blow the heads off” of his wife and children.

“This is not a case of a teen-ager rebelling against his father because he wanted to use the car Saturday night,” Morrissey said. Arnel Salvatierra “killed his father because he believed his father would make good on his threats.”

In a court hearing, Arnel Salvatierra was ruled fit to stand trial as an adult. He remains in custody in Juvenile Hall. If convicted of first-degree murder, he could be sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.