Ruling Is Blow to Defense in Bourassa Trial

A judge in the murder trial of Richard H. Bourassa Jr., the Anaheim youth who fatally shot a classmate four years after killing another friend, dealt a tactical blow to the defense Friday by ruling that details of the first incident could be admitted as evidence.

“How many crimes do I have to defend against here?” said Bourassa’s attorney, Edward W. Hall, after a two-day pretrial hearing. “(The first shooting) is extremely prejudicial.”

Bourassa is accused of killing Christian Wiedepuhl, 17, on May 24 last year while acting out a form of Russian roulette in his family’s Anaheim Hills home.

Wiedepuhl’s death came in the same room, and at the same hour of the day, that Bourassa fatally shot 13-year-old Jeffrey A. Bush on Sept. 12, 1986. That shooting was ruled an accident.

Jury selection for the 18-year-old’s murder trial is scheduled to begin Monday.

Superior Court Judge Robert R. Fitzgerald also denied other motions by Hall to exclude evidence, including testimony from Bourassa’s classmates and a videotaped interview between Bourassa and a homicide detective.

Hall argued unsuccessfully that the facts of the first shooting were not relevant to the circumstances of Wiedepuhl’s death and would prejudice a jury against his client.

But Fitzgerald sided with Deputy Dist. Atty. Kathi Harper, who argued that the first shooting, although accidental, has a direct relationship to the second shooting.

Harper said that knowledge of the first shooting is crucial when examining Bourassa’s state of mind at the time he shot Wiedepuhl.

After Bush’s death, Harper said, Bourassa became “aware of the ease of escaping culpability by crying accident. Four years later, Richard shoots and kills again, and this time the first thing out of his mouth was that this was an accident.”

In addition, Harper said, the first shooting shows that Bourassa is not as unfamiliar with firearms as he indicates to the detective in the taped interview.

“Richard Bourassa is a young man who is totally obsessed with guns. He talks about them all the time,” Harper said in court papers.

She said testimony will be presented from at least three of Bourassa’s friends who say that he frequently handled firearms and had pointed guns at them before Wiedepuhl was slain.

“He likes to take his stepfather’s .38 out of its place of safekeeping . . . and point it at people to scare them. . . . He likes to load it and pretend he’s shooting people--enemies, burglars, even friends. And that’s what he was doing on May 24, 1990, with Christian, only it wasn’t pretend,” Harper said in court papers.

Harper has contended that Bourassa retrieved the gun the day Wiedepuhl was killed, removed one of the bullets and pointed the weapon at his Canyon High School classmate in a game of “reverse Russian roulette.” 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, prosecutors said.

This scenario, Harper said, would support a second-degree murder charge if the prosecution shows “implied malice,” meaning that the shooting was “deliberately done with knowledge of the danger to, and with conscious disregard for, human life.” Nonetheless, Harper has hinted that she has evidence that Wiedepuhl’s death may have been premeditated, but she has declined to elaborate.

Hall has said that his client is not overly fascinated with guns and has only the same adolescent interest in firearms as his peers.

Despite the pretrial disappointments, Hall said that there are “enough holes” in the prosecution’s case to mount a strong defense. He said the prosecution has presented no evidence that disputes Bourassa’s version of the shooting.

Bourassa told police that Wiedepuhl got the gun from the bedroom and was pointing it around and that he took it away. The gun accidentally fired as Wiedepuhl bent down to pick up the gun’s holster, he said.

Police said that in the 1986 shooting, Bush and Bourassa--they were both 13 years old at the time--were playing with a 12-gauge shotgun and a .22-caliber rifle when the weapon Bourassa was holding accidentally fired, hitting Bush in the body and head.

Bourassa, who was 17 at the time of the Wiedepuhl shooting, has been ordered to stand trial as an adult and is being held in Orange County Jail on $100,000 bail.