When the Music Stopped, a Man Lay Dead : Crime: Donald Ternus wanted to sleep. Across the street, Anthony Ortiz’s stereo was booming. Ternus got a rifle and left his apartment. Ortiz was killed; Ternus is charged with his murder.

Almost as soon as he moved last year to a cul-de-sac apartment on the east side of Azusa, a mostly Latino neighborhood of low-end rentals and fast-food stands, Donald Ternus began to wonder if he hadn’t made a mistake.

Every weekend, it seemed, the police were making a drug bust on his block. Gunfire often broke out at night. Sometimes, the 21-year-old warehouse worker lamented to his roommate, it felt like they were the only two white guys in town.

Within a few months, Ternus had bought a 12-gauge shotgun, loaded it with buckshot, and left it cocked under the headboard of his bed. He never thought of using it to kill anybody, he said. It was just good to have a gun around the house.

But late one warm summer night at the end of June, provoked by the thump of loud music across the street and fortified by two six-packs of beer, Ternus decided to take a stand.

What happened next is at the core of a Pomona Superior Court jury’s deliberations this week. Ternus, who has been held in Los Angeles County jail without bail since the June 30 incident, says he acted in self-defense. The district attorney contends that it was murder.

What is undisputed is that Ternus, with his rifle, marched over to the shabby brown-and-tan apartment building across Glenfinnan Avenue. Anthony Ortiz, 37, a glass cutter, had lived in Unit C for five years with his wife, Irma, and their two young daughters.

“Me, myself and I . . . Me, myself and I,” pumped the dance tune from Ortiz’s stereo. Ternus, shouting obscenities, called for him to turn it down. Obscenities were hurled back.

By the time the shooting was over, Ortiz lay face down in a puddle of blood, his stomach and skull ripped open by two blasts from Ternus’ gun. Ortiz’s cousin, Jeffrey Mora, who had ridden a bus down from Northern California for a family reunion the next day, was wounded in both hands, his arm and groin. A friend, Joe Rodriguez, who had come over to drink a beer, took a lead pellet in the nose.

“I never even thought of killing a person,” Ternus testified this week. “I was just trying to prevent a physical confrontation. . . . I didn’t think they would mess with somebody who had a gun.”

But Deputy Dist. Atty. Ingrid Uhler, who Wednesday concluded her case for murder, attempted murder and assault with a deadly weapon, contends that Ternus acted more as a vigilante.

“He thought he was doing Azusa a favor by getting rid of these . . . Mexicans,” Uhler said in her closing arguments. “He’s thinking, ‘They can’t run me, they can’t run this neighborhood.’ . . . He thought at that point he was king of the mountain.”

For Ortiz, a hulking man who weighed in at more than 300 pounds, it was a weekend of celebration. He had spent the afternoon in El Monte, for his mother’s 61st birthday. Then he returned to his apartment, where he continued to relax on the balcony, listening to the radio and sipping a rum and Coke.

His party days, however, were long gone, his wife said. Ever since their first daughter was born seven years ago, he had done everything for his family. His business of fitting windows in high-rise buildings was picking up. He cooked and cleaned around the house. And the big reunion planned for July 1, the fifth straight summer that all 200 members of his extended family would be getting together, meant the world to him.

“It was a special, special occasion for us,” Mora, 22, said. “Everybody was happy and laughing.”

Ternus had been having a fine night too. A husky man with reddish hair parted in the middle, he had come home in the early afternoon from his job loading trucks at an electronics and appliance warehouse. He had no plans for the evening, until a friend dropped by and proposed they head to the Orange County Fairgrounds to see a motocross race.

When he was dropped off at his apartment shortly after midnight, Ternus’ ears were still ringing from the roar of the engines and he was pleasantly buzzed from what he guessed were about a dozen beers. The only problem would be getting up at 5 or 6 the next morning to go to work.

Then, standing there in his driveway, he realized that it was going to be even harder than he thought. Loud music and shouting were pouring out of a neighbor’s apartment across the street.

“Hey, cut down the noise,” he remembers hollering to them. They shouted back an obscenity, he says, punctuated by the epithet “white boy.”

He yelled something else and walked back to his apartment. He took off his shoes and socks, lit a cigarette and shut the window. It didn’t help. He thought about calling the police but said he feared that the neighbors might pay him back with slashed tires.

“I was thinking, ‘I really don’t want to go over there,’ ” said Ternus, dressed in court in a dark blue blazer, white shirt and matching hankie. “The way these guys talked to me, it didn’t seem like a smart thing to do.”

But Ternus, whose father taught him to fire a gun when he was 6, decided to go anyway. He grabbed the rifle, which he had used to shoot skeet the weekend before, and walked barefoot with the gun diagonally across his chest with the barrel pointed up.

“Not intending to use it,” his lawyer, Robert D. Chatterton, said, “but to protect himself, so he wouldn’t get attacked.”

The perspective from the Ortiz balcony, however, was not the same.

“He was cussing, saying the music was too loud--which it wasn’t,” Rodriguez, 43, said. “We were wondering what had happened. Everybody was, like, stunned.”

There was some shouting back and forth, then Rodriguez, Ortiz and his other cousin, David Mora, 27, left the balcony and ran down the steps to the sidewalk. Only Jeffrey Mora stayed up above.

“I just kept my eye on this guy,” he said. “In case something went down.”

According to Ternus, the three men split up and began to circle him, with Ortiz, walking slowly, his gaze transfixed on him, approaching down the middle. Ternus said he kept looking back and forth, convinced that at any moment one of them would jump at him and wrestle the gun away.

He said he told them not to come toward him. But they continued to approach. Then he felt something hit the gun--a beer bottle he thinks, possibly hurled from the balcony.

“I was scared,” he said. “I didn’t know what was happening. I couldn’t imagine that somebody would come toward a person with a gun in his hands.”

The Mora brothers and Rodriguez, however, testified that they tried to calm Ternus down. He pointed the gun at David Mora, who fled. Then Ortiz approached him, his hands outstretched.

“Hey, put away the gun,” Jeffrey Mora heard him say. “You don’t need it. We can work this out.”

Ternus said he heard no such thing. He thought Ortiz was lunging at him. He was sure somebody else was sneaking up from behind.

He squeezed the trigger and ripped a hole in Ortiz’s abdomen. Ternus said he doesn’t remember shooting him again, but a second shot, probably fired while Ortiz was either collapsing or already lying face down, blew away the right side of his head.

Jeffrey Mora had descended the stairs, and Ternus fired at him three times as Mora ran. Rodriguez was hiding behind a van on the street. Ternus said he thought he saw something in his hand. He aimed at the car window and fired at him through the glass.

Then he went back to his apartment, lit a cigarette, opened a beer and waited. When police arrived, he refused to come out for more than 15 minutes, fearful that they would gun him down.

“They had the gall to ruin the good evening of David Ternus, so he was going to take matters into his own hands,” Uhler said. “He’s the aggressor. He’s the one who is seeking a fight. He doesn’t have the right of self-defense.”

Chatterton, however, argued that Ortiz had a history of aggression. As a young man, Ortiz had been involved in a barroom brawl. A few years later, he was convicted of a strong-arm robbery in a tavern parking lot. And just last summer, he had pleaded guilty to inflicting cruel punishment on a child, after he had grabbed a neighbor’s 3-year-old boy who had spit on his daughter and held him so that his little girl could spit back. She refused.

But Ortiz’s mother, Mary Dixon, said those were the unfortunate incidents that always seemed to befall her son. As a child, youngsters in the neighborhood used to beat him up. In high school, he dropped out because the principal wouldn’t allow him to wear his shirt untucked--a habit he had developed to hide his growing girth.

“Tony was a sweet, gentle boy, but he was a big guy,” she said. “I always wondered if that’s why people picked on him. He always seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”