Korean Grocer Denies Pointing Gun at Girl : Slaying: A woman charged with shooting a black teen-ager to death testifies that she didn’t know how to fire a weapon.

A Korean grocer on trial for the murder of Latasha Harlins testified Wednesday that she did not point a gun at the black teen-ager and does not know how the weapon went off.

Soon Ja Du, who is accused of shooting Harlins once in the back of the head after a dispute over a $1.79 bottle of orange juice, said she did not learn a bullet had struck the girl until hours later.

Testifying in her own defense, Du said she didn’t know how to fire a gun until a prosecutor showed her Wednesday in court. She said she knew so little about firearms that she wasn’t even aware that one had to pull a trigger for a gun to fire.

During a March 16 scuffle at Empire Liquor Market in South-Central Los Angeles just before the shooting occurred, Du said, Harlins struck her “over and over” in the face with an “iron-like” fist when the grocer tried to take a backpack in which the girl had placed the juice.

Harlins also threatened to kill her, she said.

“I thought that if she is holding on to (the backpack) so hard perhaps there was a weapon inside,” Du testified in Korean as a interpreter translated. “As I fell down I thought ‘Oh, my God, I’m going to die.’ ”

Harlins’ apparel and behavior also led Du to believe that the girl was a gang member, the grocer testified.

Du was the third and final witness to testify in her defense at the 3-day-old trial in Los Angeles Superior Court. Earlier in the day, Du’s husband, Billy He Du, completed testimony that began the day before, and the couple’s son, Joseph, also took the stand in her behalf.

Joseph Du, 30, testified that he was fearful of his mother working in the store on South Figueroa because he had been robbed twice there. The store had had one other robbery and 40 burglaries during the two years that the family owned it and was plagued daily by shoplifters, he said.

Four months before the shooting, he testified, up to 14 armed male gang members wearing bandannas came into the store demanding that he hire some of them. They took money from him and threatened to kill him, he said.

Soon Ja Du, in her testimony, said her son had warned her about the danger of working in the store and pleaded with his parents to sell the business. He also described to her how gang members dress so she would be alerted to them, Du said.

He told her, she recalled, that “they wear some pants and jackets, light sneakers . . . a cap or headband and have some kind of satchel and they wear thick jackets. He said be careful with those.”

Harlins, whose family has said she was on her way to her nearby home after spending the night with a friend, was wearing a similar outfit and was wearing the backpack.

Du and earlier witnesses testified that Harlins went to a cooler and put the orange juice inside the backpack in such a way that about half the bottle was sticking out.

Two children in the store testified that Harlins had money in her hand when she approached the store’s counter and said she intended to pay for the juice when Du asked her about it.

Du, however, testified that she thought Harlins was shoplifting because shoplifters often hide merchandise they intend to steal then buy an inexpensive item before leaving the store.

That belief was solidified, she said, when Harlins replied “What orange juice?” when she told the girl, “Please pay for the orange juice.”

Du said she wanted to take the backpack but couldn’t reach it, so she grabbed Harlins’ sweater instead. At that point, she said, the teen-ager suddenly struck her so hard “I thought my eye was going to fall out.”

When she fell, Du said, she instinctively grabbed the leg of a chair behind the counter and rose, hurling it at the girl. After Harlins attacked her again and knocked her down, she said, her hand touched the gun that was kept on a shelf underneath the cash register. At that point, she said, she rose and picked it up without thinking.

“I had no real purpose” for picking up the gun, Du testified. “It just happened to fall into my hand.

“I must have extended my hand,” she added. “It didn’t magically fall into my hand.”

She does not recall clearly what happened after that, she said, because she was too dazed and terrified.

She did remember hearing the sound of a shot and seeing the teen-ager disappear from sight. But the grocer said under questioning by Deputy Dist. Atty. Roxane Carvajal: “I did not point the gun at her.”

Judge Joyce A. Karlin recessed the trial until Monday, when the defense and prosecution will make closing statements before the case goes to the jury.