Humenik Murder Case Goes to the Jury : Crime: Burbank man, accused of slaying two women, was either a coldblooded killer or driven by an uncontrolled rage, attorneys say.

A jury was asked Wednesday to decide whether a Burbank man who shot two women to death and wounded two others, the culmination of a neighborhood dispute that began over pruning roses, was a coldblooded killer or was driven by a rage he could not control.

Winding up her case in the five-day murder trial of Thomas Paul Humenik, 27, the prosecutor told the jury that the shooting rampage was a “textbook case of first-degree murder.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Carol Rash said Humenik killed for “retribution, retaliation, vengeance” after weighing the decision in his mind. Repeatedly telling the jury that this should be an easy case to decide, Rash said Humenik consciously pulled the trigger 25 times, shouting, “I’ll kill you all.”

Reiterating his opening statements, defense attorney Paul Enright conceded that his client was guilty of unlawful homicide, but characterized Humenik as a man in an “uncontrolled rage” who was incapable of the deliberation and premeditation the law requires for first-degree murder.

“I disagree with the district attorney that this is an easy case,” Enright said. “It is going to come down somewhere between second-degree and manslaughter. That’s tough.”

If the jury finds Humenik guilty of first-degree murder with the special circumstance of multiple murders, a sentencing trial will be held and the same jury will decide between the death penalty or life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Rash has said she will argue for the death penalty.

Humenik’s family and a small group of relatives and friends of the victims sat stone-faced through the arguments in Pasadena Superior Court after Judge Thomas W. Stoever admonished them that he would tolerate “no facial grimaces, no sighing, no verbal or nonverbal responses.”

During the trial, several spectators audibly wept when the prosecution played a recording of a phone call one of the victims made to the 911 emergency number.

The killings occurred in May, 1992, the same day Humenik was found guilty of misdemeanor battery against Don Boyd, his 75-year-old next-door neighbor on Keystone Street. Boyd filed the charges over an incident in January, 1992, in which Humenik accosted him while he was pruning roses in a planter between the two houses.

According to trial testimony, Humenik cried on the way home from court, telling his mother and brother that the verdict was wrong. As he sat in his kitchen later, the four victims gathered on the patio of the Boyd house.

Humenik then went into his bedroom to get a semiautomatic rifle with a 30-round magazine. Because his mother and brother were trying to prevent him from leaving the house, he climbed through a window to get outdoors.

Entering his neighbors’ back yard, Humenik shot two women through a screen enclosure, then followed two more into the house. There, he trapped Boyd’s wife, Merle, 73, in a bedroom and fatally shot her. Also killed was Sheila Young, 45.

Geraldine Correll, 72, and Elfrieda Brauchle, then 48, were wounded.

In her closing argument Wednesday, Rash said Humenik began weighing his actions even before he left court on the day of the killings. “He didn’t like what the jury decided,” she said. “He appointed himself judge and jury. . . . A couple of bodies will even things out.”

Rash said Humenik made his decision at the kitchen table, telling his mother and brother: “I’m going to kill someone right now.”

She described Humenik walking into the Boyds’ back yard, chambering a round and spraying bullets through the screen. “Now he’s got two down and two to go,” Rash said. “But, hey, they’re getting away. His targets are getting away.”

So, she said, Humenik followed them into the house, where he trapped Merle Boyd in a bedroom and “he gets within 12 inches of her. . . . He’s right up next to her, shooting into her ribs, shooting into her abdomen. . . . He had to make a conscious choice each time he pulled the trigger, and he pulled it 25 times.”

Enright countered that the court case was not the cause of the shooting, but rather it was Humenik’s “interpretation, mistaken or not, that . . . he was being made fun of.”

Humenik was driven into an uncontrollable rage when he heard laughter and what sounded like the word guilty , Enright said.

Enright said proof that the act was not premeditated was the fact that Humenik took no steps to keep from being identified and that none of the women he shot were involved in the case.

“I’m not asking for slack,” he said. “I’m not asking for leniency. I’m asking for the law. . . . A mere unconsidered rash impulse is not first-degree murder.”

The jury will resume deliberations today.