Prosecutors to Seek Death Penalty in Killing of Boy, 8

Prosecutors will seek the death penalty for Gregory Scott Smith, who is accused of kidnaping an 8-year-old Northridge boy, strangling him and setting his body on fire, Ventura County Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury said Tuesday.

If convicted, Smith, 21, could face the gas chamber in the slaying of Paul Bailly, said Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Kevin J. McGee. Smith is charged with murder, arson and kidnaping. The death penalty is allowed when a murder is committed during the course of another felony.

But Deputy Public Defender Duane Dammeyer argued that Smith, who did not begin talking until age 6, is too mentally immature to deserve the death penalty.

“The death penalty is made for . . . the worst of society, the bad actors, so to speak,” Dammeyer said. “It’s not for the least of society, the people who are mentally not whole, and a 21-year-old who’s really 12 or 14 is not the kind of person who deserves the death penalty.”

Paul Bailly disappeared March 23 after his mother dropped him off at the day-care program at Darby Avenue Elementary School, where Smith worked. Paul’s body was found several hours later in a field in the Santa Susana Knolls area in Simi Valley. Prosecutors have alleged that Smith abducted Paul, gagged him with duct tape and strangled him, then set fire to his body.

McGee said Bradbury decided Tuesday afternoon to seek the death penalty for Smith after he reviewed recommendations from a team of prosecutors and investigators.

Neither man would discuss details of the decision, but McGee said the team watched a homemade videotape of Smith and read a report from the public defender’s office before reaching its decision.

The videotape showed Smith playing preschool games last Christmas with his nephews and nieces, Dammeyer said.

Dammeyer said he submitted the tape to prosecutors “to show how inappropriate the death penalty is for this case.”

“You have a kid with the mental emotional maturity of a 10- to 14-year-old who is shown . . . playing preschool games like ‘open-shut-them-knees-and-toes.’ And this is a guy who deserves to be executed?” he said.

Dammeyer said the report outlined Smith’s school records, including transcripts of his progress in special-education classes and diagnoses from his teachers.

Smith weighed only five pounds when he was born and suffered pneumonia with a high fever when he was 6 months old, Dammeyer said. Although there is no direct evidence that Smith’s low birth weight and illness slowed his mental development, “there are many studies correlating low birth weights to problems later on,” Dammeyer said.

Witnesses testified at a preliminary hearing that Smith was fired from other day-care programs for playing too roughly with children, punishing them too frequently and leaving them unattended.

One 11-year-old girl testified that Smith had singled Paul Bailly out for punishment at the Darby Avenue program, often throwing balls at him and frequently “benching him, forbidding him to play with other children.”

Smith is being held without bail in the Ventura County Jail until his trial, which is scheduled for Oct. 26.