Anger Changes a Tiny Hamlet : Justice: Residents of backcountry hamlet want driver punished for fatal accident. Driver says they’ve got it all wrong.

The place sounds downright bucolic--Sunshine Summit--but the venom that is coursing through this North County backcountry hamlet has erupted through an open sore.

It’s a community where first names suffice, and these days, two names are on just about everyone’s lips: 31-year-old Johnny, who’s dead from a car crash, and 23-year-old Paul John Jr., who was behind the wheel and will be in Vista court today to claim his innocence.

Like some angry desert thunderstorm, nasty, mean words unleashed by Johnny’s death have destroyed the serenity of Sunshine Summit--at the general store with the Texaco gas pumps out front, the ma-and-pa restaurant, the farm-supply store, the local real estate office and the mobile home park, where the late-afternoon sun is denied by Palomar Mountain.

They’re talking about the night in June when Johnny--a nickname for Steven Paul Lawrence--hitched a ride with Paul John Talerico Jr. and how the speeding car slammed into a tree alongside California 79, and how Paul John Jr. should be held responsible for manslaughter.

And if that’s not bad enough, Paul John Jr. was driving with a suspended driver’s license, and the car, a red 1988 BMW, was stolen, according to court records.

Someone published a community flyer to attract more attention to what happened. “This community needs to see justice done by imposition of the maximum sentence,” it reads. Write the judge, it admonished.

So people have. Fred Yeiser wrote that Paul John Jr. “has abused and victimized the whole area . . . (and) thinks that he can do no wrong,” according to court records. Others--who don’t want to be quoted by name for fear, they say, of retaliation by the Talerico family--say Paul John Jr. is a hellion on wheels, a hot dog, a speed demon who’s the terror of the highway with his car and motorcycle driving.

Sally McDaniel, who works in the district attorney’s victim assistance office in Vista, said Sunshine Summit residents have been calling and writing her about Paul John Jr.’s alleged carryings-on. “They say they know what kind of a person he is, but they’re intimidated,” she said. “They’re not victims, but they feel like they’re victims.”

Vista Superior Court Judge Ruston G. Maino acknowledges the animosity directed Paul John Jr., who does odd jobs but these days has been hanging around his parent’s mobile home, banned from driving.

“The people in the community think you’re an out-of-control person, vicious and violent,” Maino remarked the other day at one of Paul John Jr.’s court appearances.

All this has Paul John Jr.’s father bristling. “Sure he’s a hard kid to handle, but he’s good,” Paul John Talerico Sr. says. “He even baby sits for people.

“He can be stubborn and bullheaded. He’s a typical Italian boy. But he’s being stepped on.”

So what happened that night, back on June 7?

Johnny was having some drinks at Maggie’s Place, a popular local watering hole and food joint. If Johnny had one failing, said best friend and Sunshine Summit Market owner Rob Walker, it was his lust for liquor.

Paul John Jr. was playing pool at Maggie’s and offered Johnny a ride home. They decided, Paul John Jr. would say later, to use a friend’s key to get inside the Warner Springs Resort, farther down the highway, for a late-night soak in the hot sulfur pools.

What happened next is at issue.

At Paul John Jr.’s preliminary hearing, the California Highway Patrol said he must have been driving at least 75 m.p.h. when the vehicle fishtailed out on a curve, barreled out of control and slammed into an old oak tree alongside the two-lane highway. Bark was torn off the tree like a candy wrapper.

Pieces of the dashboard still litter the ground. An accident reconstruction expert put the speed of the car at 67 m.p.h. when it hit the tree.

Johnny was maybe the most popular fellow in town, if not also the shyest, a couple months away from marrying his sweetheart. And just like that he was dead, his broken body wrapped pretzel-like around the front passenger seat.

Somehow, Paul John Jr. walked away from the crash. And if Johnny’s friends were any less civilized, Paul John Jr. might find himself facing a lynch mob. But the law got to him first.

The San Diego County district attorney’s office charged Paul John Talerico Jr. with misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter and driving a stolen vehicle, a felony. He could serve four years in state prison.

Paul John Jr. was ordered at his preliminary hearing to stand trial. In a plea-bargain that would probably have led to a year’s time in jail, Talerico then pleaded guilty.

But now Paul John Jr. said he wants to change his plea to innocent. He says he didn’t really understand what he was admitting when he signed his guilty plea. He said he didn’t know the car was stolen; it was a friend’s, and he was driving it while trying to sell it for his buddy, he says.

Besides--and this is what galls everyone who knows Johnny--Paul John Jr. says the accident was Johnny’s fault.

“We had driven about 3 miles, and Johnny told me about dead man’s corner, and before I knew it, Johnny was getting his hands on the steering wheel,” Paul John Jr. said in an interview this week. “He tried to yank it.”

Johnny was drunk, depressed and suicidal, Paul John Jr. said.

“I wasn’t going that fast until he grabbed the wheel. We went into a slide, and I either had to speed up or roll (the car). It’s like when you’re driving on ice. Do you hit the brakes? No. You turn your wheel into the slide and give it gas to straighten it out. You do the same thing in any slide.”

In Vista Superior Court today, Maino will decide whether to allow Paul John Jr. to change his plea to innocent or force him to stand by his guilty admission. The district attorney’s office wants the guilty plea to stand because, as the prosecutor said, it would be hard to put on a trial now.

“Time and delay are the enemies of truth and justice,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Steve Carver said.

The legal machinations surrounding the case have left the folks at Sunshine Summit a bit confused. They just want Paul John Jr. behind bars, and their obsession with that has caused quite a stir out there by Palomar Mountain.

“If Johnny grabbed the steering wheel, it was probably to keep Paul John on the road,” said Walker, for whom Johnny was chief clerk at the store. “There was no way Johnny was depressed. I had never seen him so ‘up.’ (He was) going to get married in August, and Johnny was as happy as I had ever seen him.”

At a midday, mid-week memorial for Johnny, said Walker, nearly 200 people showed up to pay tribute--out of a community of about 350.

“Except for when they talked about putting a landfill up here, and that Japanese cattle feedlot,” Walker said, “I’ve never seen the community get so up in arms over something as they have been over Johnny’s death, and Paul John.”

The elder Talerico says that if his son hasn’t been lynched, he was at least railroaded by his first defense attorney to plead guilty, and it’s time to set things right.

He said the community uproar against his son has caused grief, but he’s not about to leave town by sunset.

“When we first moved here, nine years ago (from Santa Ana), things were pleasant,” he said. But then Talerico and Rob Walker got into some business squabbles over the lease of a thrift store Talerico’s wife wanted to operate, and things started to sour.

Both Walker and Talerico admit they haven’t gotten along since.

Talerico, who works at a dry cleaner’s in Fallbrook, says he has his own knot of friends at the mobile home park, old folks for whom his wife has fed meals and helped clothe. They’re standing by him and his son, he says.

“I’m not the kind of person who will give up and walk away from this,” he said of the animosity he faces in Sunshine Summit. “This is my family, my home, my kids, and I’m going to take care of them.

“My son was raised one way: if you’re right, you’re right, and if you’re wrong, you’re wrong, and if someone picks on you, you pick right back at them.

“I just want to live in peace. I came out here to settle down, and be damned if I can do it. I don’t feel comfortable up here any more, but be darned if I’ll move out.”