Experts Square Off in Wrongful Death Suit : Killings: Bobby Jay Steele, 16, died after being shot four times by officers. His parents and a former police chief believe he was murdered. LAPD’s specialist says it was self-defense.

The dispute comes down to three bullets to the front of the head. And how quickly you die.

Armed with new technical evidence, the parents of Bobby Jay Steele now believe their 16-year-old son was murdered two years ago by angry Los Angeles police officers who cornered him in an attic after Officer James Beyea was killed. The family contends the officers then planted their dead colleague’s gun on the boy’s body.

“They executed him in revenge for the death of a fellow officer,” said the parents’ attorney, Carol Watson. “They had him in an attic with no witnesses around so they killed him.”

But four LAPD officers, who are defendants in a wrongful death trial under way in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, argue that Steele was indeed armed with Beyea’s service revolver, and that he threatened police with the weapon even while he was repeatedly shot in the head inside the darkened upstairs loft.

“There’s no evidence that an execution occurred,” said Asst. City Atty. Philip Sugar, who represents the officers. “That’s a fantasy of Ms. Watson’s.”

The civil case, which seeks unspecified damages, went to trial Monday before U.S. District Judge A. Wallace Tashima. The trial is expected to last another week. The defendants include Sgts. Gary Nanson and Mark Mooring and Officers John Hall and Salvador Apodaca.

Nine jurors must decide whether Steele posed a real threat to the officers or whether the police went in and killed him to avenge Beyea’s murder. In the space of two to three minutes, Steele was twice shot squarely between the eyes, and once more just below the right eye. A fourth shot was fired into his back.

To buttress their case, Steele’s family hired D. P. Van Blaricom, a former Bellvue, Wash., police chief, who testified as an expert witness.

Van Blaricom testified that the dead officer’s gun had been tampered with, that it did not carry the boy’s fingerprints, and that the revolver was left turned upside down next to the boy’s body among the attic rafters. The gun was on the right side of Steele’s body, although he was left-handed.

He also noted that the boy’s hands were free of blood stains, despite what the witness said was the normal human reaction to immediately reach for your head and feel the wound. And he questioned why police didn’t handcuff Steele after shooting him the first time, rather than continuing to fire at him.

“It just doesn’t sound like very logical behavior,” Van Blaricom said in an interview this week after completing his trial testimony. “This whole case defies logic.”

But the defense brought in their own expert, an Army surgeon with experience treating casualties during the Vietnam War. He testified that a human body can persevere and threaten others, despite three wounds into the head.

“Approximately 99% of the people in the United States would expect a shot to the head to be immediately fatal,” Dr. Martin L. Fackler testified on Friday. “But this is not necessarily the case.”

The shooting occurred just after midnight on June 7, 1988. Beyea, 24, and his training supervisor, Officer Ignacio Gonzalez, had responded to a burglary call at an electronics shop in North Hollywood. Beyea, a rookie with less than three months on street patrol and the grandson of an LAPD officer, began struggling with one of the suspects.

“I see the individual raise up his arm and it’s pointed right at Jim,” Gonzalez testified, struggling not to cry. “In quick succession, I see the muzzle flash of two gunshots. That’s, ‘Boom! Boom!’ Jim goes down.”

Police arrested 19-year-old Alberto Hernandez in the bushes about a block from where Beyea was killed.

(Later charged as an accomplice, he was convicted of murder in a trial in which prosecutors and police contended it was Steele who had shot Beyea in the head and groin. However, Steele’s family believes a third suspect, who was never captured, may have shot the officer.)

The family also believes that Steele should not have been killed, even if he had a role in the initial burglary.

After Hernandez was arrested, officers next were drawn to a vacant house when a police dog alerted them to something hiding in the attic. Creeping slowly up a ladder, Officer Hall, a flashlight in one hand and his gun in the other, spotted Steele lying between two joists.

Hall described how the teen-ager complied with an order to raise his hands. He said Steele told him that the suspect he was looking for was downstairs. But then, Hall said, things changed quickly and tragically.

“His hands drop down and his shoulders are coming up and I can see now he is grasping a gun,” Hall said.

Firing from 15 feet away, Hall shot the youth in the head, inflicting what he thought was a fatal wound. Hall said he climbed down the ladder to help officers search for other possible suspects.

Moments later, officers downstairs heard movement coming from the attic. Sgt. Nanson climbed the ladder and shot the youth in the head. He came back down. Then officers said they heard more sounds coming from the attic. This time, Sgt. Mooring and Officer Apodaca went up and each fired, striking the teen-ager two more times. Police said that every time the four officers fired, the teen-ager was reaching for the gun.

Although the family wants to know why the police dog or tear gas or a SWAT unit wasn’t used to coax Steele down from the attic, police said such a procedure would have been improbable.

“I was not absolutely aware that anybody was even in the attic” when officers first arrived, Nanson testified.

The case likely will come down to which expert witness the jurors believe.

Van Blaricom, a 30-year police veteran, served as chief in Bellevue for 11 years before retiring in 1985 to become a city councilman. He said he has worked as an expert witness on dozens of civil cases, studying ballistics and crime scenes. He charged the Steele family $150 an hour for research, plus $1,500 a day for court time.

The most amazing thing to him was that if Steele was a cop killer, why didn’t he blast his way out of the attic?

“If I had just murdered a cop and I was hiding in an attic and I had his gun, the first thing I’d probably do is shoot the police when they came up there,” he said. “Or I’d hide the gun. But I sure wouldn’t leave it lying next to my body.”

He also wondered how the officers were able to shoot with such deadly precision while creeping up a ladder and balancing their guns and flashlights in the dark. “This is incredibly accurate shooting under the circumstances,” he said.

Fackler, called to the stand by the defense, said he too works as an expert witness in lawsuits. While he normally charges $165 an hour plus $500 for half a day in court, he told the jury: “In this case I’m waiving these fees and not taking anything.”

He said a 1902 study focused on 15 people who had survived rifle shots to the head. “Three of these did not even lose consciousness,” Fackler said.

In a research project last year that studied 14 children shot in the head, he added, “There were four survivors in this group.”

Turning his testimony to the dying Bobby Steele, Fackler said: “Although quite weak from loss of blood, this person would still be able to make purposeful movements. The brain would still be sending down messages to do something.”

Before his fateful confrontation with police, Steele, who was raised by his grandparents, Robert and Pauline Steele, had been in little real trouble with the law. Although police have said he was a known member of the Vineland Boys gang, he did not have an extensive juvenile arrest record.