Injured Girl Denies She Asked Friend to Lie About Fight

Testifying in court for the first time since her face was slashed in a brawl last August, Amber Jefferson on Wednesday angrily denied that she told a friend he could make $1,000 if he told police the attack was racially motivated.

In testimony that saw her fight to control her emotions, Amber disputed testimony given earlier by 17-year-old Matt Stewart, who was with the 15-year-old Garden Grove girl at a Stanton apartment complex on Aug. 6--the night she was cut by a shard of glass during a fight between two groups of young people.

Stewart had testified Tuesday that Amber had told him he would receive $1,000 if he claimed the attack was racially inspired.

But in court Wednesday, Amber offered a different picture of what happened. She said it was Stewart who brought up the idea of filing a lawsuit during a conversation with her mother at the Jefferson home shortly after the fight.

“Matt said, ‘I got beat up pretty bad, is it possible that I could sue?’ ” Amber said. “My mother said, ‘I don’t think so.’ ”

Amber said there were no further conversations between Stewart and any members of her family about the possibility of pursuing a lawsuit and that they never offered him $1,000 to lie on their behalf.

“I don’t even know where he came up with $1,000,” Amber testified. “To tell you the truth, if I had $1,000, I would be out shopping; I wouldn’t give it to him.”

Amber’s testimony came in the third day of a preliminary hearing for Kurt David Wimberly, 18, who is charged with mayhem for allegedly throwing the glass that slashed the left side of her face from her temple to her neck.

Clad in an orange jail jumpsuit and flanked by his attorneys, Wimblerly stared intently at Amber during her testimony. She is scheduled to take the stand again today.

Amber and her parents--her mother is white and her father is black--have alleged that the attack was racially motivated. The incident became a rallying point for civil rights activists who maintained that it was proof that racism is prevalent in Orange County.

However, while bringing charges against several people involved in the fight, the district attorney’s office declined to file hate-crime charges in the case, saying the brawl stemmed from a dispute between two girls over Wimberly and was not motivated by racial hatred.

Yet on Wednesday, Amber maintained that the attack was racial.

“I think it’s because of my color,” she said when Assistant Dist. Atty. Kathi Harper asked her if she knew what had caused the incident that left her face disfigured.

Facing television cameras and a packed courtroom, Amber broke down in tears several times during her testimony as she recounted the events that led to the near-fatal injury that left her hospitalized with a deep gash down her face and a broken jaw.

In graphic detail, she described the cut that caused paralysis on one side of her face along with a reddish-colored scar.

“I had 10 1/2 hours of surgery. They had to sew each nerve and each gland and the muscle back together again,” she said. “My mouth was wired shut and they had to put metal bars in my face to keep the bones in place.”

Under questioning from Harper, the former Santiago High School cheerleader told the court that her life has changed dramatically since the attack.

“It gets me really sick when I have muscle spasms,” she said. “I throw up a lot. It came to the point where I can’t even cheer because if I jump up and down I get a headache, so I just decided to avoid all that and quit cheerleading.”

Amber said that she has difficulty remembering the details of the attack itself and that she never saw who threw the object that wounded her.

The night she was hurt, she said, she was with four other teen-agers whom she had known for a couple of days. They had piled into Stewart’s car and gone to the Disneyland Hotel for about an hour, then gone to another hotel for a party that never materialized.

There, she said, she drank about six ounces of vodka and orange juice that someone had mixed together in an orange juice container. After a short while, she said, the group headed back to the Stanton apartment complex where Amber was spending the weekend with another friend.

Amber said she and some of her friends got out of the car near the Wimberlys’ house to walk back to her friend’s apartment when they came upon a group of people, some of whom were armed with bats.

“I got hit in the back of the legs,” she said. “I fell to the ground, and when I turned my head around, that’s when I saw Kurt directly behind me with a bat.”

Amber said Stewart carried her back to his car and sat her down in the passenger seat, closed the door, then walked around the back of the car to get in on the driver’s side. A few seconds later, she said, she saw a bat raised above Stewart and he said he had been hit.

“I got out of the car to get away. I was trying to get away as fast as I could, but my legs were hurting,” she said. “I saw something very shiny in Kurt’s hand. . . .”

It was moments later that Amber apparently was hit with the glass shard. Amber said she heard one of her friends, Lewis Jones, 19, yelling, “You killed my home girl.”

Amber said her next memories are of being in the hospital. “All I knew was my face was very, very swollen and it was bandaged,” she said. “I didn’t know it was all sewn up until one day when I looked in the mirror.”