Prosecutor Questions Accused Youth’s Account of ’86 Fatal Shooting of Father

A prosecutor on Tuesday relentlessly led a Glendale youth through the moments when he shot his father to death, asking whether he looked as he fired three shots into the victim’s face and whether he listened for his father’s final gasps.

Responding with tears in his eyes, 20-year-old Arnel Salvatierra told a Pasadena Superior Court jury that, when he shot his father nearly two years ago, he was acting out of fear and confusion, and remembers little about the event.

Salvatierra was a high school senior when he shot his father, Oscar, as he lay sleeping in the family’s Glendale home. He is being tried as an adult.

Tells Jury of Fears

In earlier testimony, Salvatierra, who has remained in Juvenile Hall since his arrest, admitted that he shot his father--but said he did it out of fear because he was a frequent victim of his father’s beatings.

Salvatierra told the jury Tuesday that in the week before the slaying, his father had “threatened me several times that he was going to shoot me, kill me, blow my head off.”

Later he added, “I didn’t have a lot of choices it was either him or me, and I chose me.”

But in her cross-examination Tuesday, interrupted by numerous objections, Deputy Dist. Atty. Susan Wondries repeatedly asked whether the real reason he killed his father was anger over Oscar Salvatierra’s efforts to stop him from seeing his girlfriend, and fear that the father was about to find out that he made several unauthorized purchases with family charge cards.

Girlfriend Accused

The defendant’s 18-year-old girlfriend, Teressa DeBurger, is awaiting trial as an accessory. She is accused of returning the handgun used in the murder to the home of a friend, and of laundering Arnel Salvatierra’s clothes to remove traces of gunpowder.

The prosecutor asked Salvatierra several times why he had fired a third shot into his father’s head.

“Isn’t the reason you shot your dad a third time because you were mad at him for taking Teressa away?” she asked.

“I didn’t have clear thoughts, I only remember being confused and afraid,” the defendant replied.

Wondries then asked him whether he remembered aiming at his father’s bloody face before firing a third shot.

Reaction to Photo

When Salvatierra maintained, as he has throughout his testimony, that he only remembered pulling the trigger, and had no recollection of taking aim at his father’s head, hearing gasps, or seeing any blood, Wondries approached the witness stand with a photo of the murder scene.

Sobbing, Salvatierra turned away and asked Judge Gilbert Alston, “Your Honor, do I have to look at this?”

Alston said he could answer without looking at the picture. Salvatierra repeated that he remembered no blood.

The killing briefly achieved national notoriety when it was learned that, two days before his death, Oscar Salvatierra, an executive for the San Francisco-based Philippine News, had received a letter threatening him with death for the paper’s coverage of the political turmoil marking the final days of Ferdinand E. Marcos as president of the Philippines.

The day after the Feb. 19, 1986, killing, police and FBI agents arrested the younger Salvatierra.