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Victim Told of Threats by Accused Boyfriend : Violence: Jacqueline Reay, 16, was pressured for sex, probation officer testifies. The troubled 17-year-old defendant faces charges in her slaying.

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Two weeks before being fatally shot by her boyfriend, a 16-year-old Thousand Oaks girl told a church counselor the boy was pressuring her for sex and threatened her life if she resisted, a Ventura County probation officer testified Thursday.

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“I’m afraid he would kill me,” Jacqueline Reay told the counselor, Officer George Contento testified.

The revelation came during a hearing in which Superior Court Judge Steven Z. Perren refused to release the 17-year-old defendant to his mother’s custody.

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Perren agreed that Reay’s death apparently was accidental, but nonetheless ordered the boy kept at Juvenile Hall until his Sept. 12 trial. The judge said the defendant “acted utterly irresponsible in brandishing a gun.”

Reay died July 12 after being shot once in the eye by the boy, who was playing with the loaded handgun, authorities said. He is charged with one count of murder and two counts of brandishing a firearm.

The girl’s statement to the counselor was one of several revelations made by Contento on Thursday. He also said that the 6-foot-4, 240-pound defendant had been involved in four fights in the last year with smaller classmates at Phoenix School, a Camarillo special-education school run by the county.

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The boy’s attorney and his friends previously had portrayed the defendant as being nonviolent. And authorities cited his lack of criminal history in explaining why they are not seeking to try him as an adult.

The boy’s parents are divorced, and his father has had custody of him for the past eight years.

According to Contento, the boy has had behavioral problems since the age of 5. In response, his father has sought psychiatric help for the boy and placed him in a home for troubled teen-agers from 1983 to 1985, Contento said. The boy also had been placed in a psychiatric counseling facility for a short period since then, he said.

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He attended the special-education Phoenix School because of his emotional and behavioral difficulties, authorities said.

He became enraged on Jan. 5 after being advised of a one-day suspension for fighting. He knocked a computer monitor and television set onto the floor, Contento said.

Contento said the boy has beaten several other students at the school. In one altercation, he left his opponent with “two knots on the head, pain in the face and broken glasses,” Contento said. A school official who intervened in that fight called it the “worst I have seen someone beaten,” Contento testified.

In another fight, the defendant’s challenger was 5-foot-5. He grabbed the smaller boy “by the throat and shook him with both hands,” Contento testified. And in yet another confrontation, he lifted a “younger and smaller peer” and “threw him into the wall with great force,” Contento told the judge.

As for her confession to Lona Chesley, the counselor at Conejo Valley Church of the Nazarene, Reay said “her boyfriend” was “forcing her to submit to whatever he wanted,” Contento testified.

When asked if they had had sex, the girl became silent.

“She looked down at the floor and didn’t answer,” said Chesley’s report, read in court by Contento. “Jackie said, ‘I’m afraid he would kill me.’ ”

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But the boy’s mother told the judge that her son is nonviolent. She described her son and Reay as a loving couple who were frequently “holding hands, always together . . . walking in the water, putting on tanning lotion.”

Most of the school fights were not his fault, she said. Other children started them and her son defended himself, she said.

She told Deputy Dist. Atty. Donald C. Glynn that she has never seen her son become violent.

“I have not witnessed anything,” she said.

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