4 Convicted in Fatal Beating of Ecclesia Girl

Four members of the Los Angeles-based Ecclesia Athletic Assn., a quasi-religious group formed to shepherd black children away from inner-city strife, were found guilty Friday of manslaughter in the beating death of the 8-year-old daughter of their spiritual leader.

After 11 hours of deliberations, the jury voted 10 to 2 to deliver the harshest verdict possible in the case, which has been a source of fascination in this tiny mill town for several months. Unlike California, which requires unanimous verdicts in criminal cases, Oregon law stipulates only that a minimum of 10 jurors agree.

The defendants--Willie Chambers, 35; Constance Jackson, 39; Frederick Doolittle, 28, and Brian Brinson, 31--face maximum prison terms of 20 years each on the first-degree manslaughter convictions.

The four had been accused of beating Dayna Broussard to death seven months ago at a farmhouse in rural Sandy where the group had been staying.

Evidence during the three-week trial showed that the beating was conducted in front of nearly 50 other Ecclesia children after the defendants consulted by telephone with Broussard, who was in Los Angeles at the time. Chambers testified that Broussard gave him permission to discipline Dayna because the child stole a piece of zucchini from another youngster’s plate, and then bit Jackson, who had tried to punish her.

The case, which was tried in rural Clackamas County, was highly emotional and touched on sensitive issues involving race, religion, socioeconomics and the alternative life style maintained by the defendants.

Jurors interviewed afterward said they tried not to let those matters affect them.

“I don’t think their race or their religion or their beliefs entered into anything that we deliberated about,” said juror Donald Keeney, who voted with the majority. “What we looked at was strictly the evidence of what happened that night, the night she died.”

Juror Marilyn Simonsen said she “just sat there and bawled” after concluding that the defendants were guilty.

“I was convinced that they were basically good people, good people who went wrong,” she said. “It was just a wrenching decision.”

Clackamas County Circuit Court Judge John Lowe read the verdicts without comment to a packed courtroom while the four defendants, their lawyers and the prosecutor stood somberly before him.

As the verdict was read, Jackson began to cry. Afterward, Chambers and Brinson each shook the hand of prosecutor Alfred French, and then all four were led away in handcuffs to the Clackamas County Jail, where they will remain until they are sentenced in about six weeks.

Prosecutor French said he was “tired and happy” after the jury made its decision. Defense lawyers said the verdicts will be appealed.

The defense team had hoped that at most their clients would be convicted of a lesser charge that carries a five-year prison term. The two dissenting jurors had pressed for convictions on that lesser charge, one of them said.

The jury’s decision marks a climactic chapter in a story that has captivated this largely white county for seven months, ever since members of the mostly black group from South-Central Los Angeles arrived at a local fire station with Dayna’s battered body.

The verdicts do not, however, end Ecclesia’s legal morass in Oregon. Jackson and three other women in the group still face charges of criminal mistreatment in the alleged beatings of other Ecclesia children.

And juvenile proceedings are continuing in the cases of 53 Ecclesia children who were placed in foster care in the wake of Dayna’s death. Oregon authorities are seeking long-term, although not permanent, custody of those children, whose parents are, for the most part, sticking by Broussard.

Before coming to Oregon, the children, along with their parents, had lived for more than a decade in a converted bakery on Avalon Boulevard in South-Central Los Angeles. Their life style was communal--they call themselves an extended family--with shared finances, meals and child-rearing duties.

Ecclesia’s ill-fated dream of helping black children out of the ghetto through a strict regimen mixing religion, discipline and athletics was a persistent theme throughout the manslaughter trial, in which nine children, aged 6 to 14, were the state’s star witnesses.

In voices so tiny that lawyers repeatedly asked them to speak up, the children described how they gathered in the garage of their farmhouse to watch the defendants discipline Dayna.

The prosecution charged that Dayna was hit more than 500 times with a variety of implements--among them a rubber hose, a braided electrical cord, a bamboo stick, a weight belt and a PVC pipe--and then draped over a window when she complained that she could not breathe.

Fourteen-year-old Joe Williams told the jury that after they removed the child from the window, the defendants placed her on the floor directly in front of him.

‘And That Was It’

“She just took two last breaths, two last breaths, and her eyes rolled back, and after that, I guess Brian (Brinson) noticed it because he rushed over there, and he picked her up, and I just seen, I just seen them take Dayna out of the room, and that was it,” Williams testified.

During closing arguments and throughout the trial, defense lawyers maintained--and Chambers and Brinson testified--that the children’s statements were exaggerated and that much of the discipline was actually theatrics. They claimed that Chambers struck the floor rather than hitting Dayna in an attempt to frighten the other children into behaving.

In addition, the defense lawyers introduced an independent autopsy to show that Dayna died not from the beating but from being draped over the window--an act they said was intended to help the child by giving her some air.

But in his arguments before the jury Thursday, prosecutor French dismissed that theory. “Hanging that child out the window was not an act of compassion,” French said. “Ladies and gentlemen, that’s what you do with a carpet. That’s not what you do with a badly injured little child.”

As to the cause of Dayna’s death, French told the jury: “Your own common sense tells you that she was beaten to death. She walked into that room of her own ability and she was carried out dead. She didn’t die of any strange disease or unknown causes. She was beaten to death, and that’s all there is to it.”

In an unusual twist for the father of a victim, Broussard remained in the defendants’ camp throughout the trial.

Although the Ecclesia leader did not attend the court proceedings, some of his followers, including his wife, also named Dayna, did appear for closing arguments Thursday. After the case went to the jury, Ecclesia spokeswoman Carolyn Van Brunt held an impromptu press conference in the hall, with Broussard’s wife at her side.

Asked how the events of the last seven months have affected their group and the defendants, the women declined to answer. But in his closing argument Thursday, defense attorney Tim Lyons answered for them:

“The death of Dayna Broussard was a terrible tragedy. These people, who have come so far with their lives since 1977, have lost a member of their family.”