Witness Tells Court Girl Collapsed, Said: ‘My Friend Is Dead,’

A Chatsworth girl whose alleged assailant has been charged with shooting her and killing her 14-year-old companion staggered along a remote street, her neck wrapped in a blood-soaked cloth--before collapsing onto a car whose driver had stopped to help her, the driver’s wife testified Thursday.

“I thought maybe there had been an accident and she was injured and needed help,” Mary Cheney testified in San Fernando Superior Court. “She staggered toward the guardrail. When we stopped the car, she fell against the car. I rolled my window down and she was covered in blood.”

“I thought perhaps she was going to die.”

The woman said her husband rushed the girl to a nearby hospital while her sister-in-law, also a passenger in the car, tried to stop the bleeding. The girl eventually recovered and gave police a description of the suspect, which led to his arrest four days later in the Elysian Park area.

The woman’s testimony came on the third day of a trial for Roland Norman Comtois, 60, who is accused of killing 14-year-old Wendy Masuhara and shooting the girl’s 13-year-old companion after driving them in his camper to a remote Chatsworth canyon shortly after midnight on Sept. 18, 1987.

Comtois’ companion, Marsha Lynn Ramos, 36, allegedly lured the girls into the camper as they walked from the younger girl’s house to Masuhara’s house on a quiet Chatsworth street. Comtois bound and gagged the girls, undressed the 13-year-old and himself and forced her to orally copulate him, the girl testified on Monday.

Comtois placed the girls in an abandoned station wagon and fatally shot Masuhara in the head, the surviving victim testified.

The younger girl survived because she put up her hand to deflect the bullet moments before Comtois fired at her, police said. She managed to walk down remote Woolsey Canyon Road, where the shooting took place, to Valley Circle Boulevard, where Cheney and her husband stopped to help her.

“I rolled down my window and asked her what happened, and she said, ‘He shot me and he killed my friend. My friend is dead,’ ” Cheney testified.

Also on Thursday, a Los Angeles police officer described the dramatic foot chase near the Los Angeles River that ended in Comtois’ arrest after the officer fired three shots at the suspect, hitting him twice.

Officer Dan Labrada said Comtois ran toward the river after the officer and his partner saw him standing outside his camper. They had gone to the area after a caller told police he had seen a camper there matching the description of Comtois’ vehicle.

Labrada said he became entangled in barbed wire atop a wall he tried to scale during the chase and fired at Comtois, who was running along the river’s edge about 100 feet away.

Comtois, who had rolled down the river’s steep embankment after being shot, said as he was being handcuffed: “I’m sorry . . . didn’t mean to kill ‘em,” Labrada testified.

Both Comtois and Ramos, who will be tried separately in July, face the death penalty if convicted on all counts.