Jury Sees Sailor Admit to Killing in Video

After presenting evidence to the jury for only one day, the prosecution rested its case Wednesday in the trial of Todd Everette Fluette, the Navy man accused of stabbing a man to death in Balboa Park last year.

The last piece of evidence presented in San Diego Superior Court to the jury by Deputy Dist. Atty. Gordon Paul David was a videotape of a police interview in which Fluette, 19, admits killing Michael Wayne Hamilton, 48, on Dec. 8.

“I reached over and sliced his neck,” Fluette said in a calm voice.

Fluette said that, before the slaying, he saw a movie and spent several hours walking through and around Balboa Park with another Navy hospital corpsman, 23-year-old David Allen Kring, who pleaded guilty last week to first-degree murder.

Fluette said that, after the two stopped to drink whiskey near the lawn bowling courts on the west side of the park, a man approached.

“This guy comes up and he just sits down next to us,” Fluette told investigators. “We didn’t think anything of it.” But after moving to a different location, the man followed the pair and again sat down next to them.

“He started rubbing up against my leg and I figured he was a fag after that,” Fluette said. “And then he reached over at Dave and I cut his neck.”

After being attacked, the man jumped up and said he was a police officer, Fluette said. But the pair chased him, Kring jumped on the man, and Fluette stabbed him several more times, he said.

Fluette told police “I was mad and angry” after the man touched him.

Even though Fluette quietly wiped tears from his eyes during a court recess after the videotape was played, he was calm and showed little remorse during the interview with detectives two days after the killing.

“I was just standing there (and) I couldn’t believe what I did,” Fluette said at one point.

Later in the interview, he admitted making two mistakes: “Shouldn’t have done it. Shouldn’t be talking about it.”

After being pressed by detectives to explain why he killed the man, Fluette said: “Because he was going to get us in trouble . . . for cutting him.”

Fluette, who is charged with murder and conspiracy, will receive a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole if he in convicted of all charges.

Defense attorney Joseph Kownacki will present Fluette’s side of the case beginning today.