School Administrator Identifies Defendant on Videotape of Riot : Trial: Damian Williams’ distinctive posture is clearly recognizable, his onetime assistant principal testifies. He says he often disciplined the youth in high school.

Pointing to what he described as a distinctive, swaggering gait, the assistant principal of a Mississippi high school identified Damian Monroe Williams on Thursday as the man shown on videotape hitting trucker Reginald O. Denny in the head with a brick.

Edwin M. Douglas said he could identify Williams by his “slouchy,” forward arching of the shoulders when he walked. Williams was sent to him several times for discipline, Douglas said, when the defendant was a student at Warren Central High School in Vicksburg during the 1988-89 school year.

Douglas’ testimony was part of a prosecution focus on identifying Williams, 20, and Henry Keith Watson, 29--both of whom are charged with attempting to kill Denny--as the attackers seen on the videotape. They are also accused of assaulting or robbing seven other people at Florence and Normandie avenues as rioting broke out last year.

Before testimony began Thursday, Superior Court Judge John W. Ouderkirk excused a white woman juror who was hospitalized after becoming ill. She was replaced by an African-American woman selected at random from the five remaining alternates.

Another white female juror had been replaced earlier by a Latina, and the panel is now composed of four blacks, four Latinos, three whites and an Asian-American.

Attorneys for both sides have said the racial makeup of the jury is important for the community to accept its verdict. The defendants are black and Denny is white.

In his testimony Thursday, Douglas said he had completed advanced courses in kinesiology--body movement--and had used that knowledge to identify opposing football players from game films when he was a coach.

He said Williams was one of five students who got into enough trouble to wind up before the school’s discipline review committee. As he watched videotape of the man prosecutors say is Williams, Douglas said: “The more I watch the movement, the more readily recognizable he is.”

Answering questions from Williams’ attorney, Edi M.O. Faal, Douglas said Williams was never in one of his classes, never played on a team he coached and joined no extra-curricular activities he supervised. Douglas said that he last saw Williams at a disciplinary review hearing in 1989.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Lawrence C. Morrison later asked Douglas if he could recognize players he first coached in 1975 years afterward without having seen them in the interim. Douglas said that he could, and that he also has recognized classmates from his 1968 graduating class without having seen them for 10 or 20 years.

Faal said later outside the courtroom that “it is an absolute waste of time and money to bring someone from Vicksburg, Miss., who bases his testimony on shoulder movement.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Janet Moore said prosecutors had attempted to get testimony from teachers and coaches who knew Williams in Los Angeles, but thought it better to go out of state for witnesses because local teachers are in “a volatile situation.”

She declined to elaborate when asked if Los Angeles teachers were afraid to testify.

Before Douglas took the stand, Paul Chapman, who worked with Watson at an armored car firm, said he had no difficulty identifying Watson from television footage of the Denny beating. Before he saw the video, Chapman said, someone at work had mentioned that “one of our people was involved in that beating.”

In testimony Thursday afternoon, Daniel R. Potter, Nike Inc.’s Patent and Inventions Manager, identified a pair of black sneakers shown on videotape as Nike’s “Air Trainer Max” model that was discontinued in 1992.

Potter said he could not identify the man wearing the shoes, but the sneakers are part of the clothing prosecutors say was worn by Williams, along with a white T-shirt, knee-length dark shorts and blue bandanna.

On cross-examination from Faal, Potter said Nike made 160,000 pairs of the shoes in 1991 and 1992, and that 10,000 pairs had been sold in California. He said he did not know how many young, black men at Florence and Normandie were wearing that model shoe on April 29, 1992, when rioting broke out.

“If you follow the individual who commits crimes at Florence and Normandie, you will find the same Nike shoes,” Moore said outside court. The shoes, she said, are one more piece of a puzzle the jury can use to show that the person shown committing those crimes on videotape is Williams.

No shoes like those identified in court were recovered from Williams’ home when authorities executed a search warrant after arresting him, she said.