Courts: Ruling places 17-year-old in County Jail. Defendant fatally shot a boy in a similar incident four years ago.

Richard H. Bourassa Jr., the 17-year-old Anaheim youth charged with murdering a classmate four years after he fatally shot another school friend, will be tried as an adult, a Juvenile Court judge ruled Monday.

“The court finds that Richard Bourassa is an unfit subject to be processed in the Juvenile Court,” said Juvenile Court Judge C. Robert Jameson. “I’m extremely offended at this offense and find it to be quite serious.”

Bourassa, prosecutors allege, killed Christian Wiedepuhl, 17, on May 24 while acting out a form of Russian roulette in the same room of his family’s Anaheim Hills home and at the same hour of day that he fatally shot 13-year-old Jeffrey A. Bush. Bush’s death on Sept. 13, 1986, was called an accident by police.

Bourassa on Monday was transferred from Juvenile Hall to Orange County Jail and was being held in lieu of $200,000 bail.

During the two-day hearing to determine whether Bourassa should stand trial as an adult, Deputy Dist. Atty. Kathi Harper described the youth as having a fixation with guns. She alleged that Bourassa wrote a school English paper on them and was found to have advertisements for pellet guns in a duffel bag that also contained a picture captioned “Kill Saturday” and a letter with the reference, “Get that S.O.B.”

Harper declined to elaborate on the markings. Defense attorney Edward W. Hall said he believed that they did not relate to the victim and were merely doodles besides others such as “Richard and Allison forever.”

Hall had argued that there was no evidence that Bourassa intentionally killed his friend, and he tried unsuccessfully to discredit a probation officer who recommended that Bourassa be tried as an adult.

The shooting, which was on a Thursday, involved a “high degree of sophistication and planning,” Harper said, from the time he first thought about getting his stepfather’s gun from his parents’ bedroom before the shooting to the “whole big lie” he twice told police to “cover up” after the shooting.

Harper contended that Bourassa retrieved the loaded five-chamber, .38-caliber handgun, removed one of the bullets and pointed the weapon at Wiedepuhl in a “reverse Russian-roulette” scheme. But, because he is dyslexic, he may have miscalculated the chamber’s rotation and fired a live round when he thought he would hit the empty chamber, Harper explained outside court.

This scenario, Harper said, would warrant a second-degree murder charge, for which the prosecution must show “implied malice”--a wanton and willful disregard for the life and safety of another human being that resulted in death.

Hall said that even in that scenario, which his client denies, the prosecutor’s evidence shows that the shooting was “very close to an accident, misadventure, misfortune, a tragic situation.”

After the shooting, Bourassa told police that it was Wiedepuhl who got the gun from the bedroom and was pointing it around when Bourassa took the gun away. The gun accidentally fired as Wiedepuhl bent down to pick up the gun’s holster, striking him in the head, Hall explained outside court.

Hall told the judge that Bourassa, “rather then being someone who potentially plans things out and potentially covers them up, he is an individual involved in a tragic situation.”

Hall added that Bourassa’s taped statements to a 911 dispatcher after the shooting indicated that he did not plan the incident. “He told the dispatcher ‘he’s starting to turn over, what should I do?’ and he made statements like ‘Oh, Christian how can I help?’ and words to that effect. It would seem that someone who had planned (the shooting) would not have necessarily had that attitude.”

Harper, however, said that Bourassa was also recorded as saying, “My God, will I be in trouble for this?”

“Who was Richard Bourassa concerned about? Christian Wiedepuhl or Richard Bourassa,” Harper said.

Hall discounted the remark as taken out of context and only reflected concern normal of “human nature.”

Bourassa is scheduled to be arraigned today in North Orange County Municipal Court.