Man Testifies at Hearing of Wife’s Alleged Killer

Velasta Johnson’s widower testified Wednesday that he ran into her alleged killer moments before she was stabbed to death in January.

Clyde Johnson testified that, on Jan. 17, he was making a daily walk for his 90-year-old wife to a doughnut shop near their Ventura home when he encountered a man later identified as Kevin Kolodziej, 25.

“He was shaggy. He had clothes draped over him. He was barefooted,” Johnson, 90, said at a preliminary hearing for Kolodziej in Ventura County Municipal Court. Investigators said Kolodziej had just walked away from the intensive care unit at Ventura County Medical Center, around the corner from the Johnson home.

“He asked me for a place to take a shower, I guess,” Johnson said. “I told him I don’t have any place.”

Kolodziej hurried on, Johnson testified.

Moments later, prosecutors allege, Kolodziej (pronounced kuh-LO-jee) entered the Johnsons’ Agnus Drive home in search of food and a shower, grabbed a sharp nine-inch knife from atop a half-eaten apple pie and fatally stabbed Velasta Johnson once in the heart.

Sensing something was wrong, Clyde Johnson testified, he abandoned his errand, went back home and enlisted his grandson, Kevin Hildreth, to help search the neighborhood for the stranger.

When they returned home, they found Velasta Johnson slumped in a flowered chair, Johnson testified.

“I asked him to help straighten her up in the chair. I thought maybe she had fainted,” Johnson testified, as Kolodziej fidgeted and hung his head at the defense table.

On lifting her blouse, they found something resembling a gunshot wound and called the 911 emergency number, Johnson testified.

“Well, she wasn’t shot, we found that out,” said Johnson, whose testimony Wednesday was preserved on videotape in case his health prevents him from testifying at trial.

As Johnson walked slowly from the courtroom, leaning on a cane and helped by his daughter, he joked dryly with bailiffs.

“How come you guys didn’t frisk me for a knife or something when I come in?” Johnson asked. Nodding at Kolodziej, he said: “I could have done it. I could have got rid of him.”

Prosecutors then presented evidence they hope will persuade Judge John J. Hunter to order Kolodziej to stand trial in Superior Court for burglary charges as well as murder. The combined charges would allow prosecutors to seek the death penalty or life imprisonment without parole for Kolodziej. Several doctors have said that Kolodziej suffers from paranoid-schizophrenia.

John Kortas, 80, who lives about a block from the Johnson home, testified that he had walked into his garage earlier that morning to find Kolodziej wearing Kortas’ paint-spattered khaki coveralls over hospital pajamas and bare feet.

“I think he said he wanted to take a shower,” Kortas said. “I said, ‘No, not here.’ I asked him to leave. . . . He was very timid. He wasn’t violent or anything. He just left.”

Kolodziej then encountered Ventura police Officer John Snowling and said that he owned the coveralls, the officer testified.

Snowling asked him to take them off and radioed his sergeant after identifying Kolodziej as a walkaway patient from the county hospital, where he was treated for wounds suffered when he stabbed himself on Jan. 5.

“The sergeant said there was not a legal hold on him, and we could not take him back to the hospital,” Snowling testified. “I offered him a ride back, and he refused.”

Snowling said he let Kolodziej walk away. Snowling then went to the hospital, where he learned that county mental health officials were considering committing Kolodziej to a psychiatric ward, Snowling testified.

Moments later, Snowling answered a call to the Johnson home, saw the mortally wounded Velasta Johnson and found Kolodziej curled up in fetal position behind a nearby house, he testified.

When police asked Kolodziej why he stabbed the woman, he replied: “I don’t know why,” testified Ventura police Detective Douglas Auldridge.

“I can’t give you a reason why, I just flipped out,” Auldridge said, reading from a transcript of his interview with Kolodziej. “I flipped out, I got scared, I shouldn’t have reacted that way. I’m sorry.”

Kolodziej said he never meant to kill Velasta Johnson and never even meant for her to get stabbed, Auldridge testified.

Asked why he picked up the knife to begin with, Kolodziej told police, “I was . . . just scared. You don’t know in somebody’s home if they are going to attack me or what.”

Testimony is expected to end today.