Drifter to Be Tried in Slaying of Asian : Crime: Trial ordered after witnesses testify that Percyval Leslie Dryden told friends he had beaten Phouvalay Thepsombandith for stealing a car stereo.

A drifter was ordered to stand trial Thursday in a murder case involving the kidnaping of a Laotian national who is presumed dead because the body was never recovered.

Percyval Leslie Dryden, 25, is charged with kidnaping and killing 18-year-old Phouvalay Thepsombandith from the 6000 block of Brooklyn Avenue in Encanto on Aug. 18.

Municipal Court Judge Janet I. Kintner ordered Dryden to stand trial after several witnesses testified in a preliminary hearing that he told friends he had beaten the victim and “took care of him.”

Prosecutors say Dryden abducted Thepsombandith after neighborhood boys reported that an Asian youth stole a stereo from Dryden’s car. Dryden abducted the first Asian he could find, Deputy Dist. Atty. Rupert Linley said.

Maria Cerezo testified that she saw Dryden abducting an Asian man at gunpoint.

Several teen-age boys testified that they heard Dryden and several friends discuss the Asian man who had been abducted.

Dashaen Bradley, 15, who lives in a foster home where Dryden’s girlfriend also lives, said he told Dryden that Thepsombandith’s cousin may have been responsible for burglarizing his car.

But, when Dryden drove up with an Asian man in his car, “we all said that wasn’t him,” Bradley testified. Bradley said Dryden hit the man on the head.

Later in the day, Bradley overheard Dryden in conversation with five or six friends. Dryden said “that he had hit him in the head with his gun,” Bradley testified.

Bradley and several other boys testified that at least two other men were involved in the slaying.

“I remember John said he shot him four times in the foot or in the leg,” Bradley said. Another man who uses the moniker 007 “said something about dragging” the victim, the boy testified.

The “evidence clearly indicates others were involved,” Linley said, but no arrests were expected soon because investigators have had trouble identifying them.

Dryden will be arraigned in Superior Court on Aug. 20. He was being held in lieu of $1 million bail.

Police confiscated a gun that may have been used in the killing when Dryden was cited for carrying a concealed weapon one day after Thepsombandith disappeared. A complaint charging Dryden with kidnaping was filed 11 days after the abduction, but Dryden remained a fugitive until his arrest in Baltimore on suspicion of burglary in early May.