Boy Testifies He Suffered Brutal Beating Ordered by Alamo at Saugus Commune : Courts: Youth says he was struck about 140 times in a punishment directed by the evangelist. The defense attorney says the memories are exaggerated.

A 15-year-old boy testified Thursday that he was beaten bloody with a large wooden paddle at evangelist Tony Alamo’s religious commune in Saugus in 1988 and that Alamo himself directed the paddling by telephone.

In more than five hours of testimony at a child-abuse hearing in Newhall Municipal Court, Jeremiah (Justin) Miller said he was held down by four people and hit about 140 times with a paddle wielded like a baseball bat as about 40 of Alamo’s followers looked on.

The beating when he was 11 left him with bleeding buttocks, which had to be bandaged for more than a week, he said.

“He said that I was a goat among the sheep and he was going to have to beat the devil out of me,” recounted Justin, who had been adopted by Alamo followers and had previously lived on an Alamo compound in Arizona.

Justin is the only scheduled witness in a preliminary hearing on felony child-abuse charges against Alamo for allegedly directing the boy’s beating over a speaker phone from his nearby house.

Judge Floyd V. Baxter continued the hearing until Friday morning after cross-examination by Alamo’s attorney dragged into the evening hours, leaving Justin yawning on the witness stand and Alamo dozing at the defense table.

As Justin described it, the sect was a strict, regimented society in which written reports by adults on children’s misbehavior were reviewed by Alamo, who meted out the discipline he said God had recommended to him.

The boy said the alleged sins for which he was beaten in January, 1988, ranged from asking a science question during a history class to wearing a metal-studded leather scarf, designed by Alamo, without permission. Alamo’s distinctive denim jackets and other clothing designs bring high sales prices in stores throughout the country.

Alamo’s attorney, Danny Davis, painted a picture of Justin as an unruly child who needed discipline and whose memories of the severity of his punishment were exaggerated by coaching from his adopted father, Carey Miller, an angry former member of the sect.

Davis spent much of his three-hour cross-examination grilling Justin over how he reached the 140-blow total, during which the attorney described the strokes as merely “swattings” and “spankings.”

Davis said the number of disciplinary reports remembered by Justin, each of which the boy said carried at least 10 blows, had grown from four or five in the initial police reports--filed in March, 1988--to eight or nine on Thursday.

“Now you’re older and you have a better memory?” Davis asked. “Did your conversations with your dad help you with that? That’s just math, not memory, isn’t it?”

Justin acknowledged that his recollection of the details had improved following discussions with his father, but he said that was only because his father encouraged him to think clearly.

After the hearing, Davis, who successfully defended Raymond Buckey in the McMartin Pre-School molestation case last year, said he sees similarities between that trial and the Alamo case.

“He’s a very unhappy kid . . . getting attention and thriving on it,” Davis said. “This is the unfulfilled, egotistical drive of parents once again.”

Alamo, whose real name is Bernie L. Hoffman, founded the Holy Alamo Christian Church more than 20 years ago when he and his then-wife began taking young dropouts, drug users and alcoholics off the streets of Hollywood and providing them with food, shelter and religious sermons.

After the alleged child beating was reported to authorities, sheriff’s deputies raided the Saugus commune in remote Mint Canyon and arrested four men but did not find Alamo.

He was arrested July 5, 1991, after federal marshals traced him to a waterfront home in Tampa, Fla., where authorities said he had lived under several aliases, continuing to operate businesses with his followers and producing taped sermons for broadcast on pay-for-play radio stations across the country. The other five suspects in the child-abuse case remain fugitives.

Justin, his father and three other family members won a $1.8-million federal court judgment against Alamo in Arkansas earlier this year on charges that Alamo stole their trucking business. Alamo is contesting that judgment.

Times staff writer Michael Connelly contributed to this story.