Sobbing Victim Describes Robbery, Rape in Sattiewhite Murder Trial : Crime: She appears as a witness in penalty phase following the defendant’s conviction of a 1992 slaying. Defense attorney contends his client’s problems stem from brain damage.

A sobbing, shaken 21-year-old woman told a jury in graphic detail on Tuesday how she was robbed and raped at gunpoint by a death-penalty defendant and two accomplices in September, 1992--a night she and her boyfriend were trying to relax on an Oxnard beach.

At one point the woman, now a Thousand Oaks resident, described how the men forced a blanket over her head and raped her at gunpoint in the presence of her boyfriend. A gun was also pointed at him.

“I was praying to God,” she said.

The victim was the first witness in the penalty phase of Christopher J. Sattiewhite’s murder trial.

Last month, the jury convicted Sattiewhite, 24, of first-degree murder in the 1992 shooting death of Genoveva Gonzalez, a mother of four. It now has the option of sending him to the gas chamber or sentencing him to life in prison without parole.

During opening statements, defense attorneys acknowledged that Sattiewhite was present during the rape and robbery of the Thousand Oaks woman.

But defense lawyer Willard P. Wiksell contended that his client did not actively participate in the beach rape and that the defendant’s criminal problems stem from two factors that are out of his control.

First, Wiksell said, Sattiewhite had a domineering father who abandoned the family when his mother delivered her 10th baby. And second, his mother was in a car wreck just days before giving birth to him, leaving Sattiewhite with permanent brain damage, he said.

“The earthquake that hit him was worse than the earthquake that hit Northridge, ladies and gentlemen,” Wiksell told jurors. He said the panel should decide on the lesser penalty for Sattiewhite.

But Deputy Dist. Atty. Donald Glynn said that Sattiewhite should be given a date with California’s gas chamber. He also said the beach rape and the Gonzalez murder illustrate that Sattiewhite is a violent criminal, an element that would allow the jury to send him to the gas chamber.

“The people will ask you to make the finding that the appropriate penalty and punishment for Christopher Sattiewhite is death,” Glynn said during his opening remarks.

The most dramatic moments of the trial by far came Tuesday when the Thousand Oaks woman was ushered into the courtroom to face one of her attackers in court.

Sattiewhite was convicted of two counts each of rape and robbery in December, 1992, in the beach case and is serving a 28-year sentence, prosecutors said. His two accomplices, Bobby Rollins and Frederick Jackson, were convicted of the same offenses and are also in prison.

The three men pleaded guilty and never went to trial.

After the men’s arrest, Ventura County sheriff’s investigators linked them to the Gonzalez rape and murder, which had gone unsolved for more than a year.

The victim of the Oxnard beach rape sobbed as she entered the courtroom.

She wiped tears away with a tissue and told the jury her story from the time she and her boyfriend arrived at the beach that night.

She said she and her boyfriend, now her husband, were approached by the suspects and were forced to give them their car keys, money and jewelry. She was too nervous to take off all her jewelry, she said, because she saw that one of the attackers had a handgun.

One suspect raided the couple’s car, which was parked at the beach. The suspects threatened to kill the couple, even though all their demands were being met.

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As one of the men asked the others to leave, she said, another announced that he was going to rape her. She was raped by two of the men, she said, as her boyfriend was trying to shield the top part of her body.

Then the couple were ordered to run as fast as they could to their car. “I thought they were going to shoot us from behind,” she said under questioning from Deputy Dist. Atty. Patricia M. Murphy.

Glynn said that a DNA analysis proved that Rollins--who testified against Sattiewhite in the Gonzalez case--and Jackson raped the woman.

Glynn said he plans to put Gonzalez’s 69-year-old mother and 12-year-old son on the witness stand. The relatives will testify about the impact of Gonzalez’s death.

Despite a previous drug conviction, Gonzalez, Glynn said, “was a kind and loving mother” who often baked cookies for her children.

Wiksell accused the prosecution of giving a partial portrayal of Sattiewhite.

Days before Sattiewhite was born, Wiksell said, his mother was involved in a car accident that left her son with brain damage. And Wiksell said Sattiewhite was abused as a child.

According to Wiksell, Sattiewhite still has a difficult time understanding complicated thoughts, and that is what allowed accomplice Rollins to manipulate him in the beach rape, he said.

“You’re going to learn that the defendant is a follower. That he is easily manipulated,” Wiksell said.

For instance, he said that Sattiewhite readily admitted his involvement in the beach-rape case, although he didn’t sexually assault the woman, and received a 20-year prison term.

“He ‘fessed up to it,” Wiksell said. “He didn’t fight the system. He’s not a hardened criminal.”

He said several psychologists will testify that Sattiewhite has “borderline mental retardation due to chronic brain syndrome.” The cause, he said, was the car crash 24 years ago.

Testimony continues today at 10 a.m. in Judge Lawrence Storch’s courtroom in the Ventura County Courthouse.