GUNPLAY : Four years ago, when young Richard Bourassa fatally shot a playmate, everyone believed it was an accident. When it happened again, the Orange County D.A. called it murder.

SEPT. 12, 1986, SHORTLY AFTER 4 P.M. Two seventh-graders, Richard Bourassa and Jeffrey Bush, are playing after school. They are alone in the den of Richard’s Anaheim Hills home, a pair of 13-year-olds training loaded guns on each other. The barrels touch. Suddenly, Richard later tells police, the 12-gauge shotgun in his arms goes off, spraying the room with buckshot. One pellet pierces the door. Another shatters the window. And several riddle Jeffrey’s body and head.

The sweet-faced boy crumples to the carpet, his blood turning it a satin red. As squad cars scream into the cul-de-sac, neighbors gathering in the driveway gaze at the upstairs window where Richard, covered with blood, is sobbing on the phone to a police dispatcher, who is trying to calm him down. He tells arriving Anaheim officers that Jeffrey had loaded the gun that would kill him, that he doesn’t know how. There are no witnesses. Police rule the death accidental.

May 24, 1990. Same hour, same room. Richard, now 17, has killed again.

Richard told the story to police this way: After rummaging through his house, 17-year-old Christian Wiedepuhl, a reedy strawberry-blond, finds a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver stored in the headboard of Richard’s parents’ bed, Richard, a husky, brown-haired high-school wrestler, confronts Christian in the doorway of the den and takes the pistol away. As Christian kneels to retrieve the holster that’s dropped to the floor, the gun in Richard’s hand fires. A single bullet hits Christian above the right eyebrow; the force is so great that it knocks out the lens of his glasses. The boy lies in a pool of blood as Richard calls police.

His story this time has an eerie echo: My friend got out the gun; it was not my fault. This time, however, Richard H. Bourassa Jr. is a suspect. And he knows it.

“My God,” he asks the police dispatcher, “will I be in trouble for this?”

Today, nine months later, Bourassa, now 18, waits in Orange County Jail for his trial on murder charges to begin next month at the Santa Ana courthouse across the street.

That he shot and killed his teen-age friend is not uncommon. On average, one child is accidentally shot to death every day in the United States; for every child killed, 10 are seriously wounded. Last spring, in Orange County alone, three teen-agers died in accidental shootings in one month’s time. But the death of Christian Wiedepuhl was particularly astonishing. How, voices of outrage asked, could a boy who had mortally wounded someone 3 1/2 years earlier pick up a gun again? Had the first shooting been dismissed too lightly? Was young Richard a cold-blooded killer obsessed with firearms, or just hideously unlucky?

Other than in interviews with police, Richard, his parents and sisters have refused to discuss the case. His lawyer, Edward W. Hall, says his client is consumed with grief and remorse. Richard, Hall says, is not some sort of psychopath; he is simply a victim of an extraordinary coincidence. Not even the deputy district attorney prosecuting the case seems convinced that Bourassa meant to gun down his friend, instead suggesting that Richard tried to frighten Christian with a backward form of Russian roulette and misjudged when the loaded chamber would come up.

But interviews and court testimony indicate that Bourassa and his friends were no strangers to guns and seemed more nonchalant than awed by them. Three friends testified at Bourassa’s preliminary hearing in November that he had pointed guns at them while “playing around,” in the words of one. The most chilling account came in an interview with a fourth boy, Bourassa’s best friend.

“Sometimes he’d point the gun at the wall. A few times he had it pointed at my head. I was scared,” the 16-year-old friend said softly. “He was, you know, fooling around.”

Did Richard ever say anything while aiming the gun at him?

“Yeah,” the buddy recalled. “He’d say, ‘Do you trust me? Do you trust me?’ ”

AN ESTIMATED 60 MILLION AMERICANS own guns, and it is not unusual to find firearms stashed in the closets and night stands of suburbia, including Bourassa’s middle-class neighborhood, where many families say they keep weapons for self-defense. The Washington-based Center to Prevent Handgun Violence maintains that almost 60% of the people who keep loaded guns in their homes do not secure them with locks, and by law they are not required to.

That was the case in Richard’s home. Two months after Jeffrey Bush died, Richard’s stepfather, Thomas J. Baldwin, drove to the Anaheim police station, collected the 12-gauge shotgun and .22-caliber rifle and took them home. When Baldwin was a child, his grandfather had taught him how to shoot them; Baldwin testified at Richard’s preliminary hearing that he is sentimentally attached to the weapons. (In a 1979 divorce settlement, he asked that only a few items be excluded from community property: a violin and his guns.) He wanted the guns, he said, for protection. He kept them out of sight but not locked up.

Those guns, and a .38-caliber pistol that he inherited after Jeff was shot, have all now figured in a death. In November, Baldwin, 51, testified that he kept the shotgun and rifle in his bedroom closet, the revolver in a drawer in his headboard and the ammunition in a bedside drawer along with a collection of Playboy magazines. Baldwin testified that he never saw his stepson handle the weapons and had no inkling that he was interested in the guns, which Baldwin meticulously examined and cleaned for possible rust every few weeks. He told the court that he had never used the guns, had only fired the pistol, without bullets, to ensure that it was working.

While they have not been charged in connection with Christian’s death, Richard’s mother and stepfather, in the minds of many, are effectively on trial, too. How could they have had no idea that Richard was interested in guns when his friends considered him a gun enthusiast? His fascination with the Army was no secret. His father designed military aircraft, his wrestling coach was a veteran, and his closest relatives--his stepfather, sister and brother-in-law--had been in the military. But even if Richard’s parents knew nothing of their son’s attraction to firearms, how, neighbors now ask, could they not keep guns locked up in their home when one of the weapons had already killed a child?

By the time Baldwin and his guns came into Richard’s life, the child had already struggled with many demons. Diagnosed with dyslexia when he was in second grade, he was held back for a year. By the time he was 8, his mother told an Anaheim neighbor, Bobbye Nickell, he had already been counseled for disciplinary problems. And the 9-year-old boy was devastated when his father died of a heart attack at age 39. His father, Richard Sr., had been a designer on the Army’s Apache attack helicopter, and a friend who has known Richard since second grade says the boy was proud of his father, showing off his helicopter drawings in class and talking about his work. Attorney Hall says the father and son had been devoted to each other. Richard was the youngest of four children and Richard and Nancy Marie Bourassa’s only son.

Six months after her husband’s death, Nancy Bourassa met Baldwin, a pilot who had once owned his own charter firm and occasionally worked as a flight instructor at Fullerton Municipal Airport. Baldwin was divorced, and his son and daughter lived with their mother and stepfather in Sunnyvale. Baldwin tried to see his children more often, but his ex-wife fought those efforts, and, at one point, two therapists recommended to the court against increased visitation rights. Baldwin’s children, the therapists said, were so upset after visits with their father that they often returned to their mother’s home early and ended up needing renewed therapy. The judge denied Baldwin’s request.

In March, 1984, Baldwin, who now works as a courier for a small firm, married Nancy Bourassa, then a clerk at an Anaheim public library. Soon after, the family moved a few miles from the Bourassas’ Anaheim home into a two-story house that was situated near the Riverside Freeway and landscaped with pine trees and junipers. The family settled into life in Anaheim Hills, an affluent and spacious community where tracts of middle-class tan-stucco homes like theirs are mixed among estate-like mansions.

Neighbors and the parents of Richard’s friends know little about how the Baldwins and their son got along but said the boy was often alone. By the time he was a teen-ager, two of his sisters had already left home, and the third was about to move out. The youth continued to have difficulty in school, but aside from ordinary parent-teen-ager rows, friends and his attorney say, Richard and Baldwin had no significant troubles. Richard’s friends say Tom Baldwin ruled the roost, and though he and his stepson weren’t exactly chummy, they shared a love for music--both play the piano--and occasionally lifted weights together at a neighborhood gym. But during his police interrogations after Wiedepuhl’s death, Richard said his stepdad “used to hit me. . . . If you got him mad, he used to throw me against the walls and push me around.”

An adult neighbor, Jackie Morris, says she remembers no complaints from Richard, only that he seemed lonely. His parents both worked, so Richard was usually alone until nightfall.

“I’m sort of the Kool-Aid mom on the block, so the kids on the street are over here a lot,” Morris says. Richard, she says, frequently lingered until the dinner hour. “We’d say, ‘Richard, don’t you think it’s time you should be getting home? We’re about to eat.’ And he’d say, ‘Can I come back tomorrow, please?’ It was kind of sad.”

“Nobody was home when (Richard) went home, so he was never in a hurry to leave here,” recalls Dale Bush, father of Jeff Bush. “He was very polite, very cordial, very appreciative--almost nicer than normal.”

THAT ANGUISHING autumn afternoon in 1986, sunlight streaked into the window of the Baldwins’ den, a small room over the garage, crammed with a worn earth-tone couch, desk and file cabinet. This, according to police reports, is where Officer Gregory Mattis found Jeff Bush, propped against the desk and covered with blood.

Mattis hastily gathered up towels, blotting Jeff’s face and soaked pink T-shirt, searching for a wound. He found several on Jeff’s torso and face. Mattis and Officer Edward Thaete quickly began first aid. When paramedics arrived, they rushed Jeff to Western Medical Center in Santa Ana, where he died the next morning.

Another officer took notes of the scene: a .22-caliber rifle on the den floor, northwest corner; a Winchester 12-gauge pump shotgun in the hallway, a “shaken” Richard, dripping with blood from trying to help Jeff, standing in his bedroom next door. The policeman asked the boy to go downstairs to the dining room, where Richard gave this account:

During the day, Jeff had asked Richard about the guns in his home. After school, the pair had gone to Richard’s with this plan: Jeff would show Richard--who said he knew little about the guns--how to load the ammunition. They got the rifle and shotgun out of the parents’ bedroom closet and took them into the den, where they unlocked the file cabinet where the ammunition was then stored. Jeff showed Richard how to put a round in the shotgun and chamber it, he told police.

Jeff had the rifle, Richard the shotgun. He said Jeff was looking through his scope, pointing the rifle at different things. Then they pointed the guns at each other. Richard was in the hallway, Jeff was in the den. Richard says he had his finger in the trigger guard--but not on the trigger--when suddenly the gun went off. At least three pellets struck Jeff. Richard told police he was going to try to help Jeff but saw how badly he was wounded and called 911.

Brown-haired, brown-eyed Jeff had just started seventh grade, where he was considered a happy and smart student. He played soccer and baseball and loved mechanical things, tinkering. “He was the nicest little boy,” Kent Cassel, Jeff’s next-door neighbor, told The Times after the shooting. “He was just one of the best-behaved boys I’ve ever met.”

Jeff was buried with a favorite toy, a remote-control car he had bought for $250 with money earned by mowing lawns and doing other odd jobs. His grave was covered with flowers of his favorite color, turquoise.

The Bush family--Dale and Brenda and another son, Brian, now 14--said they had no guns at home. Never for a moment did his parents believe their son would load a gun, much less know how. But they accepted Jeff’s death as accidental, believing that the boy who spent countless afternoons at their home would never intentionally have shot their son. During a series of recent interviews, Dale Bush recalled that Richard’s stepfather had telephoned the morning after the shooting to say that Richard wanted to come over and see the Bush family. “But then the stepfather called back and canceled that,” Bush says. “He said Richard was not going to be able to see us.”

After a while, the Bushes filed away the 12 printed and photocopied pages of police reports that recounted their tragedy in the harshly clinical verbiage that is copspeak. Dale and Brenda Bush had pored over the descriptions of the room, Richard’s interview, the property-control report with its sterile inventory of cartridges, their son’s clothing and shoes, even the towels. It was all too much to bear, the Bushes say. They had to find a way to move on, put the grief away somehow.

And in time, they did--until Christian Wiedepuhl died. Even then, forced to relive their loss as another family grappled with its own, the Bushes believed, at least for a while, that Jeff’s death was unintentional.

THE BALDWINS’ NEIGHBORS in Anaheim Hills took less time to change their minds. Such a death could happen once, maybe. But twice? No way, some of them say now. They offered their opinions to the flock of reporters who briefly invaded their suburban tract.

Until last May, they say, they believed unequivocally that the boy who had played cops and robbers and other games of make-believe with their children was the victim himself of tragic circumstance. They remember a shorter, slimmer Richard, his brown hair longer, stunned and grief-stricken by Jeff’s death. He was a good kid, they had said at the time. God, how awful for him! For the family!

Jackie Morris remembers Richard sitting on the curb outside her house, his sister Michelle beside him, his blue eyes misting over, wondering how he could ever go back to El Rancho Junior High. What would the other kids think of him? “They talked about (Jeff’s) funeral coming up, going back to school, facing his friends again,” Morris recalls. “He seemed really sorry it happened.”

Many of the neighbors say the Baldwins always kept to themselves, but in the days after Jeff Bush’s shooting, neighbors rallied around, delivering banana-nut bread and other food to Richard’s family. Bobbye Nickell remembers having spent three hours in her living room one night having a mom-to-mom talk with Nancy Baldwin. “She said he’d had a lot of problems and counseling since he was a child,” Nickell says. “When I said my daughter was hyperactive, she said she knew what I was going through.”

But there are no cozy chats these days. When neighbors gather curbside now, they are bitter, not sympathetic. Many residents say tension with the Baldwins mounted in the days after Christian’s shooting. “They’d drive into the street after work,” Morris says, “and stare at us, like, ‘How could you talk to those reporters?’ And we’d stare back at them, thinking, ‘Keep your guns and kid locked inside that house.’ “We’re angry and upset. The second shooting scared all of us,” Morris adds. “Why did the parents let those guns out again? Those parents, they knew he had problems; he already killed one kid. They should have done something.”

“You have two people in the same room, both get shot accidentally in the head? I’m sorry,” says Nickell, “it’s just too coincidental. You have a kid who had emotional problems at an early age, who loses his father at a young age, then the (first) shooting intensifies everything.” With all that, “you just don’t keep guns in the house.”

One neighbor with young children says, “We have guns in our house; my husband is an ex-cop. But we’ve talked to the kids and told them how they work, to stay away, to respect guns.” Another neighbor keeps a .22-caliber pistol, separate from his ammunition, and has discussed gun safety with his children. He sees nothing wrong with the Baldwins keeping weapons in their home after the first shooting and does not doubt that the second death was an accident.

Russell G. Ulm, the Baldwins’ next-door neighbor, says, “He was a good kid. If I’d ask him to help me--I’d say, ‘Hey, Rich, my kid was too lazy to mow the lawn,’--he’d say, ‘Sure,’ and he’d do it.” Now the Baldwins swap yard tools with him and they chat in the driveway. He says they are good people who “I know are taking this whole thing hard.”

He clucks at a cluster of neighbors talking to a reporter about Richard’s quirks. Just be careful, he says, sometimes people like to rewrite the past.

AFTER JEFF’S SHOOTING, Richard underwent counseling, his attorney Hall says, although he’s not sure for how long. He tried, Hall says, to put things back together.

Toward the end of the eighth grade he began going steady with a tall, long-haired blonde. She “dressed like a surfer” and was a year behind Richard in school, says a 17-year-old friend, Anthony Cordova. Richard telephoned her a lot and “treated her good, like a guy should.” He’d give her flowers and birthday presents, and neighbors remembered seeing them kissing outside a nearby shopping center. Friends say Richard was stung when she broke up with him a few weeks before Christian’s death. She quickly found a new, older boyfriend.

After entering Canyon High School in 1988, Richard, a muscular 5-foot-10 and 190 pounds, joined the wrestling team, a perennial powerhouse in Orange County. It was one of few school activities at which he excelled. For a while, he worked part-time at a Sizzler restaurant, taking orders and setting tables, but he quit to devote more time to wrestling. He also lifted weights and jogged, watched television and played Nintendo games, and talked on the telephone with girls. “Mostly,” he told police, “my hobby is wrestling.”

Richard’s dyslexia continued to make academics a struggle for him. He spent part of each day at the rambling high school campus in a special-education class for students of average or above-average intelligence who lagged for various reasons, including learning disabilities or emotional problems. The teacher, Susan R. Herman, who appeared in court with a school-district attorney but has not been called to testify, says she could not be interviewed. As a freshman in her class, Richard met Christian and several of the other boys who made up his loose circle of friends--many of them misfits in the cruelly judgmental world of high school.

He met Al Arthur, 17, on the wrestling team. Al was a close friend of Christian Wiedepuhl--even while recognizing that other kids thought Christian was a nerd. Christian, a pale and lanky 6 feet and 110 pounds, desperately tried to impress classmates with exaggerated stories about drinking or girls, Al says. In return, Christian was bullied mercilessly. Kids broke his glasses and, just days before his death, vandalized the blue 1979 Fiat Spyder convertible on which he constantly tinkered.

“He wasn’t really accepted in auto shop,” Al says. “People would mess with his car. He was the center of jokes a lot. Everybody ragged on him, and he just didn’t fit in. And the sad thing was, people wouldn’t let him.

“Richard wasn’t too smart, and Christian wasn’t too interested in school, and that’s how they met,” Al says. “And he saw Richard as a bigger guy that he could go to. . . . (Christian) looked up to anybody that was his friend.

“Richard wore camouflage stuff and was into ROTC. He’d brag about firing a gun. He bragged about . . . going Airborne, and to a normal person you would think, he is kind of weird, not too bright,” says Al, an articulate youth who found Richard dangerous, his alleged gun handling appalling. “A lot of people knew about the first incident. . . . I asked Christian if he ever got scared being alone with him, and he didn’t think anything of it. Christian was into air (pellet) guns but nothing with real bullets. . . . Richard is good with guns and he knows about them.” He recalls Richard talking about hollow-point bullets and gunpowder and about how he had calmly summoned police after Jeff’s shooting.

“Richard didn’t have a lot of friends,” Al says. “He’d try to brag about himself. I don’t think he fit in well socially with anyone. Nobody wanted to mess with him.”

One thing bothered Al: Richard ridiculed Christian behind his back. Tony Cordova says Richard occasionally taunted his friend, yanking his underwear up outside the waistband of his pants. But the pranks Richard pulled on Christian were mild compared to the tyranny he underwent daily at school.

“Christian, he was like a really big-time nerd at school. Everybody picked on him. He was tall, really skinny and weak,” recalls Tony, a short, round-faced sophomore at Canyon High. Richard told him about Jeff’s shooting when they were in eighth grade, two years after it happened, regaling friends with the story of his efforts to save the dying boy. It seemed, Tony remembers, “that he thought it (the shooting) was cool, like it was exciting.”

When they first palled around together at Canyon, Tony says, Richard “was a big-time wrestler. I’d stay over at his house and go to the mall and (we’d hang) around with the football players in high school. After the tenth grade he was into Army business and getting a crew cut. In class he started wearing the Army hat and talking about guns and saying that he didn’t mind shooting them.”

Tony says Richard told him he wanted to join the Army so he could fire weapons and get paid to shoot people.

Despite their knowledge that he had killed someone, many of Richard’s friends, including Christian, were strangely unruffled that he would want to use a gun or shoot anyone again--except when he allegedly aimed at them.

On the witness stand in November, Tony recounted how he and Richard got out both guns involved in Jeff’s death and aimed them at the wall of the Baldwins’ bedroom, pretending to fire them-- pakew ! pakew !--as they lay on the bed. Another time, he says, he was with Richard in the Baldwins’ upstairs office. “He came in and showed me his .38 and the bullet that fits in it. He pointed it at me and said, ‘Boom!’ The second time was about two months before he took Christian.”

In the forestlike landscape surrounding Anaheim Hills, Tony and Christian regularly fired Christian’s .22-caliber pellet guns at bottles and trees and tin cans. Sometimes others joined them--Richard did only once because he was afraid of trouble with rangers--but mostly it was just Christian and Tony. In fact, Christian once got in trouble at school for having a pellet gun in his car.

Still, the point-blank gun episodes with Richard scared Tony deeply. “I thought it was, you know, really weird,” he said in an interview. He and Richard weren’t spending much time together by last May because they’d had a couple of fights unrelated to guns. But the day Christian was shot dead, Tony said, “I was supposed to go to his (Richard’s) house to go jogging.”

Clearly, the knowledge that Richard Bourassa had been involved in the death of a classmate didn’t make him an outcast, perhaps because Jeff’s shooting was ruled an accident.

Midway through his freshman year, a boy who had known Richard in second grade renewed their friendship after they met again in Herman’s class. Both were on the wrestling team. They spent long afternoons together, usually at Richard’s house, telephoning friends, watching television and talking.

The boy and his family do not want to be identified. But the friend’s parents, who remain confused and torn over what to make of Richard’s arrest, say he could be mature and coolheaded when it came to their son.

“He was responsible,” the father said in a telephone interview. “I had a terrible fight one night with my son; he wanted to run away. Richard mediated. He had a good side to him. He was a good boy.”

But the teen-agers got into trouble together, too, staying out past their curfews. Four months before the shooting, the friend’s mother says, she forbade her son to see Richard, even telephoned Canyon High’s principal--who declined interviews--to ask that the youths be separated.

“He said, ‘I don’t think you realize that your son is lucky to have a friend like Richard, who is loyal and stands up for him,’ ” the mother now recalls. “We didn’t even know about the first shooting.”

Despite their camaraderie, the friendship was threatened when Richard started toting out his stepfather’s guns, says the friend. Usually, he said in an interview, the .38 revolver was pointed away from him, but more than once Richard held it at his head. He asked the boy if he trusted him.

“I told him, ‘No, I don’t trust you. You don’t aim guns at friends,”’ the friend said.

“I used to be over at his house every day. Every day after school. I still can’t get over thinking that it could have been me.”

THE VIDEO CAMERA enters the tidy home through the front door, panning around the living room. One hour after Christian was shot, police are chronicling what four months later will become, with Richard’s arrest, a crime scene.

In the master bedroom at the top of the staircase, a .38-caliber bullet is resting beside that day’s newspapers on the pastel sheets of the unmade bed. The headboard drawer is open. Down the hall, Richard’s room is filled with wrestling pictures and trophies, an Army banner with his brother-in-law’s company name, a television, stereo and keyboard. The camera doesn’t linger on the spent 12-gauge shotgun shells on the dresser, which, Baldwin will later testify, he collected, like pine cones, during a Mt. Baldy visit the weekend before Christian’s death. The camera moves into the office. A large red stain on the carpet dominates the picture.

At that point, Richard Wiedepuhl, huddled in the front row of the courtroom as the video rolls on, pushes up the sleeves of his navy golf sweater and begins to sob for his son.

A bailiff hands him a box of tissues. At the defense table, Richard Bourassa hunkers over in his chair, fidgeting with his hands, his manacled feet rapidly tip-tapping the floor. His face flushes from time to time, and he cries, too. The Baldwins sit stoically a few feet away, never speaking as this torment unfolds.

Silver-haired and stocky, Tom Baldwin reveals no emotion as he stands up for a clearer view of the television screen. Nancy Baldwin remains seated, looking pained, intermittently fingering her short auburn hair and clasping her hands. She frequently fixes her eyes on her son, and at every court recess the judge allows the parents to scoot chairs up to the holding area, where the family whispers for long minutes.

Another video is played during Richard’s preliminary hearing in the largely empty Fullerton courtroom of Municipal Court Judge Margaret Anderson. This one was taped at the Anaheim police station, where Richard had volunteered to answer questions on the day of the shooting. Richard sits in jeans and a T-shirt across a table from Detective Carl Martin. They are alone.

Throughout nearly two hours of questioning, Richard, who was not told he was being taped, appears nervous periodically but seems relatively composed. But when Martin leaves the room to fetch police reports or a glass of water, Richard rests his head in his arms and cries.

He tells the brown-haired, middle-aged detective that he knows little about guns but says he had mentioned to Christian, who “loved” them, that his stepfather had a revolver. After school that May 24, Christian came over, and they watched “Airwolf,” a TV adventure show about a futuristic attack helicopter. Then they played Nintendo in Richard’s room. Christian wasn’t very accomplished and grew bored, so he asked if he could go look at Tom Baldwin’s ham radio set in the den.

Instead, Richard tells Martin, he heard Christian holler out five or 10 minutes later, “I found the gun.” Richard opened his bedroom door and told Christian, who was standing in the hallway, to put the gun back where he found it. He closed his bedroom door to keep out the family’s two dachshunds and returned to the Nintendo game.

Perhaps five minutes later, Richard says, Christian hollered again, “I’ve got the gun.” This time Richard opened his bedroom door and found Christian standing in the den, pointing the gun toward Richard’s head.

“I said, ‘Christian, give me the gun.’ And, he said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s not loaded.’ And I said, ‘Christian give me the gun,’ and he said, ‘Fine.’ And, he, uh, handed it to me, and I looked around for, he looked down to get the holster for the gun, and that’s when it went off.”

Richard shows the detective first how he wrapped his hand around the butt of the gun and held it with the barrel pointing downward, then how his friend knelt down for the holster before gazing up into Richard’s face. Then the gun went off. Christian landed face down, his head near the doorway. There was “a loud explosion,” Richard says. “It sounds like, and my ears were . . . ringing, and it was, like, all kinds of muffled. . . . It was a high ring.”

Martin clearly is skeptical of Richard’s story. Why, he asks, would a kid ferret through someone’s parents’ belongings? He did it all the time, Richard says. Why didn’t Richard see to it that Christian put away the gun? I trusted him. If Christian knew so much about guns, why would he not know the gun was loaded? I don’t know. How did the bullet get taken out of the gun? I don’t know. Why does Richard keep insisting he knows nothing about guns when he is at least familiar with them? I don’t know about guns; they scare me.

Detective Martin hammers him hard, trying to throw him off balance. Why don’t you have a car? My parents can’t afford one. A job? No time with wrestling. What’s that on your face? A blemish. You’re gonna graduate high school at age 19? I failed second grade. You’re a jock, and the friend you shot, he was kind of a wimp wasn’t he? Well, he was weak, but he was pretty cool.

“Why is this the second time? Here you are,” Martin persists, “17 years old and you’ve already killed two of your friends. Seems to me like it would be kinda dangerous to be friends with you. You don’t live to be a ripe old age when you’re friends with Richard. Why did you have your finger on the trigger, Richard?”

“I don’t know. I have no idea.”

Martin tries to jar Richard by telling him Christian is dead--at the time of this taped interrogation the teen-ager was on life-support machines. Richard seems stunned and grows tearful, and Martin drills him about whether they are real tears.

“I don’t cry very much,” Richard tries to explain. “If I am, it’s real tears.”

After the interrogations were over but before the Canyon High school year was out, it was decided that Richard would move in with his sister, Denise Smith, in her mid-20s, and brother-in-law, Billy, who live in Army housing at Ft. Irwin in Barstow. He worked part-time as a busboy at the base’s officers club and rode the bus 45 minutes each way through the desert to summer school classes at Silver Valley High School in Yermo. There, no one, not even school officials, knew of his past.

BUT RICHARD was still a subject of scrutiny in the Orange County district attorney’s office as detectives collected and analyzed evidence. The process took Anaheim investigators, who were also diverted by their work on another fatal youth shooting, four months. And when it was over, Deputy Dist. Atty. Kathleen M. Harper went to court to charge Richard with murder. “We have one survivor, and he’s told us a story we don’t believe,” said Harper. Police reopened the investigation into Jeff Bush’s shooting, but Harper decided against filing criminal charges, in part because the physical evidence had long been destroyed.

Beyond the fact that history repeated itself, there was no evidence to suggest Jeff’s death was anything but accidental. Harper said she considered charging Richard’s parents for having the guns in the house, but decided that such a charge would not hold up either, because the weapons, while not locked, were stored out of sight. Child endangerment was probably the strongest charge because of the absence of laws dictating gun storage in the home. And it would hurt their case, Anaheim police point out, that Richard was almost an adult.

Fingerprints and gunpowder tests did not seem to conclusively challenge Richard’s story. Gunpowder residue found on Christian’s clothing indicated, experts testified, that he was shot from at least three feet away. Richard told police Christian was 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 feet away when the gun went off. But Christian’s clothes had been wadded up and stuffed into a paper bag by a hospital worker, possibly tainting the test results.

Richard has said the gun had been pointing down when it discharged. A forensics specialist who conducted Christian’s autopsy said the bullet entered his forehead in a slightly upward direction before lodging in the brain. On cross-examination, the specialist said a bullet’s direction may shift depending on curvatures in the bone it strikes.

One of the four bullets found in the gun chamber was dented, suggesting someone had cocked the hammer. But who?

The district attorney’s office concluded that the facts implicated Richard. After filing the charges against him in September, Harper put the pieces together this way for reporters outside the courtroom: Richard, she contended, had retrieved the loaded handgun, removed one of the bullets and pointed the weapon at Christian in what she termed a “reverse Russian roulette scheme.” But because he was dyslexic, he may have miscalculated the direction the chambers would rotate and thus fired a live round when he thought he would hit the empty chamber. This scenario, she successfully argued, warrants trying Richard for murder as an adult because it involved what she called “a high degree of sophistication and planning” from the time Richard thought about getting out the gun to “the whole big lie he told police” after the shooting.

Hall countered at the time that Harper’s scenario, which his client denies, shows that the shooting was “very close to an accident, misadventure, misfortune, a tragic situation.”

A few weeks after school started, Richard surrendered in court on an arrest warrant charging him with murder, returning to Orange County after having spent the summer in the desert, where he had stayed in contact with Hall. He was held at Orange County Juvenile Hall before a judge ruled that should be tried as an adult. Should he be convicted of first-degree murder--which seems unlikely given the lack of evidence to date for premeditation--Richard could face a maximum sentence of 25 years to life in prison. A conviction for second-degree murder--requiring proof that a person had reasonable knowledge of the consequences of his actions but was reckless--would carry a 15-years-to-life prison term.

Aside from the physical evidence is the question of Richard’s interest in and knowledge about guns. Hall attributes the glaring inconsistencies that emerged from the preliminary hearing to “white lies” that a teen-ager might tell out of a sense of self-preservation and stresses that that does not a murderer make. Instead, Hall says, the most serious charge Richard should be facing is manslaughter, legally defined as killing without malice, and a charge more typically filed in cases of accidents involving gross negligence, such as drunken driving.

“I don’t believe that the physical evidence, once this case is litigated fully, is ever going to show that, by any stretch of the imagination, the firing of the handgun was a deliberate act,” Hall says. “It’s going to take a while for this to all come out in court and part of the reason . . . is that Richard has the unique situation of four years ago. That’s always going to be a factor when anybody hears about this case. . . . People are going to say, ‘Lightning doesn’t strike twice.’ ”

Both sides expect that details of the earlier shooting will be an important factor in the case if they are allowed to be aired in court as they were in Richard’s preliminary hearing over Hall’s objections.

“I think a lot of people feel that he should never have been in a position to have access to guns and therefore place blame or responsibility on the parents,” Hall says. “But I don’t find it at all odd that somebody who was involved in an accidental shooting might several years later, when the peer group that one is in has access to other types of weapons, that they would, out of curiosity or whatever, be curious about messing around with a gun.”

In an 11th-hour bid to avoid trial three months ago, Harper says, Hall agreed to have Richard plead guilty to manslaughter charges and accept a seven-year sentence at the California Youth Authority. Harper says she considered it to avoid putting all three families through the emotional trauma that a trial would surely bring. But ultimately, she decided against it, telling Christian’s father, “We think he was murdered.”

When Judge Anderson ruled in November that there was enough evidence to show a crime had been committed in Christian’s death, she referred not only to the forensic evidence and expert testimony but to Richard’s own story and the testimony of his teen-age friends. She said she found his comments about being unfamiliar with guns “totally unbelievable.” She added: “I was appalled beyond belief that he had been playing with a shotgun that he had killed another human being with.”

In explaining her ruling, Anderson said the four-day hearing had been “one of the harder cases I’ve had,” as she daily watched the pain played out on the faces of the families.

The mothers of both victims are still so devastated that they talk only tentatively, if at all, about the deaths. Not Richard Wiedepuhl. Empty, livid, lonely and struggling to grapple with the loss of his only son, he refuses to keep quiet, fearing that people will forget, that important lessons will not be learned. In interviews at his Anaheim Hills home and conversations outside courtrooms, his words rush out in eloquent bursts. Tall and graying, he has pale-blue eyes that flash with fury at Richard’s story that Christian toted around Baldwin’s gun and pointed it at his friend, a story he finds preposterous. He cries freely.

“Something died in me when Christian was killed. There is a hole in my heart,” he said tearfully after one court hearing. “I’m still trying to come to terms with it.” The Wiedepuhls have one other child, Gabrielle, who is 20.

Although he acknowledges that Christian had a “nerd” image at school, Wiedepuhl discounts it as just an awkward adolescent phase. “I knew he would have no problems (in the future); he would adapt himself. He wanted to go to college and do some engineering or something.”

“He was so full of life,” said Wiedepuhl. “He was interested in anything he could make with his hands. . . . I was amazed that by reading things how he could absorb them.”

Inside the family’s home, Christian’s room is much as it was on the day he died. Model cars, which he built and had been proud of, line his dresser. An assortment of electronic equipment--including a computer, video camera, police scanner and 35mm camera--clutters his desk. A darkroom he built in his closet is intact, and the fish in his salt-water tank are still being fed.

Christa Wiedepuhl fought back tears in an interview several months after the shooting as she described the mechanical aptitude her son displayed even as a young child: “In kindergarten his teacher told me that with Lincoln Logs he had built a chalet. The other kids around him were just astonished at what he had built. (The teacher) couldn’t believe it.”

Like the Baldwins, Wiedepuhl attended each day of the preliminary hearing. He has never spoken to Richard’s parents, nor they to him, Wiedepuhl says. The only communication he has had from the Baldwins is a $100,000 settlement payment via their homeowner insurance policy--the Bush family had received a similar payment, both of which preclude civil lawsuits.

Wiedepuhl has no qualms about the Baldwins keeping guns in their home, even after Jeff’s fatal shooting. “Even if I had known about it, I might have thought, ‘Well, OK, you’ve learned your lesson: Have respect for guns.’ But he didn’t, and the parents didn’t either,” Wiedepuhl says sadly. “A $4.95 trigger lock could have prevented the whole tragedy.”

He believes his son was murdered, and he wants Richard Bourassa imprisoned for life. “I’m not looking for revenge,” Richard Wiedepuhl says sadly. “I just hope somebody will read about this and say, ‘Where are our guns? Where are our kids?’ If that gun wouldn’t have been so readily available, that kid couldn’t have gotten to it. Nobody can bring Christian back. . . . But if another kid can be saved, well, that’s all we can hope for.”

Even so, Richard Wiedepuhl intends to see the trial through. The Bushes have not appeared in court, but Wiedepuhl has kept Dale Bush updated, occasionally seeking out perhaps the only person who can truly empathize with him.

Dale Bush, who tried to accept Jeff’s death as a tragic accident, now says he has had a change of heart. It came after several courtroom revelations he would learn about from either the newspapers or Richard Wiedepuhl.

“There are too many coincidences,” Bush says. “But then sometimes I feel I don’t want to know. I’m caught in the middle. I think (Richard) is sick. . . . How many deaths will it take to show that he’s a killer? I’ll let the jury decide. I don’t know.”