Man Faces Trial in Killing Tied to Massacre : Courts: 21-year-old, to be tried as an adult, says father forced him in ’90 to help slay alleged participant in Guatemala murder of their family.

In a case that at times sounds like a tale from the surrealistic novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a 21-year-old man from Guatemala has been ordered to stand trial as an adult for the apparent revenge killing of a North Hollywood man who allegedly took part in the massacre of seven members of the Guatemalan’s family five years earlier in the Central American country.

San Fernando Valley Juvenile Court Commissioner Gary A. Polinsky ruled that although the killings took place when Elmer Orellana was 16, Orellana was unfit to be tried as a juvenile. Polinsky based his ruling in part on the fact that after Orellana arrived in the United States illegally in 1987, he used various aliases and false birth dates that made him appear to be older than he was.

Orellana, who contends that his father forced him to participate in the 1990 killing, has been jailed since his arrest. He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted.

Orellana’s attorney, Gerson S. Horn, said his client “is not denying his involvement, but because of the extraordinary and compelling factual circumstances in this case,” he should be tried in Juvenile Court.

He said Orellana “has a personal history racked with trauma and has witnessed unspeakable horrors.”

The prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Kenneth Barshop, said he does not know whether Orellana’s story of his massacred family and the revenge killing is true, but admitted that it could play a role in the outcome of the case.

“It may mitigate his actions, but it does not excuse them,” he said.

There are at least two stories of the events that led up to the 1990 killing.

One was told in the July 1, 1985, edition of the Spanish-language newspaper La Opinion. It carried a wire service story with a Guatemalan dateline reporting the deaths of “new victims of political violence in Guatemala.”

Citing a police spokesman, the story said that four days earlier, seven members of a family were gunned down in their home in the village of Vieja Anguiatu near the Salvadoran border by a group of men armed with machine guns.

Five bodies were found in the entryway of the house, while the bodies of two women, who apparently tried to escape, were found on a road nearby.

The story identified the victims as Jose Antonio Orellana y Orellana, 74, and Lucila Najera de Orellana, 67, whom it called siblings; their son; two daughters-in-law and two grandchildren. Elmer Orellana says the two identified by name were actually his paternal grandparents, and the rest were other members of his family.

The gunmen escaped into El Salvador, and police suggested that the killings were connected to the civil war going on in that country at the time.

Orellana, through his attorney, says the killings were not political crimes and happened much differently. As he tells it:

His father had traveled from their village of Pita Floja into the nearby town of Agua Blanca to pick up some money that had been wired from the United States. On the way back, his father was attacked by bandits, who shot him in the shoulder. The father returned fire and killed one of the bandits. The father went back to Agua Blanca and surrendered to police, who held him in jail for two months.

While the father was in jail, friends of the dead man came to Orellana’s house and demanded entry. When the family members, including then-11-year-old Orellana, refused, the men opened fire with automatic weapons. With Orellana watching, the men began torturing his mother, eventually shooting her 17 times.

Orellana was able to escape, and later returned with his maternal grandfather, who lived across the border in El Salvador. In addition to his mother’s body, they found his paternal grandparents, an uncle and aunt and two cousins. Orellana said he had to beat away dogs who were eating the bloody remains.

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Released from jail with no charges filed, his father vowed revenge and later found one of the men and killed him, Orellana said. He says he came to the United States illegally two years later at age 14. About three years after that, his father came here on the trail of another alleged killer of his family, Francisco Guillermo Noguera.

On Jan. 25, 1990, Orellana said, his father ordered him to accompany him to a location in North Hollywood, where they waited in their car outside an apartment driveway. The father armed himself with a shotgun and gave Orellana a handgun to protect himself.

Upon seeing Noguera begin to back out of the driveway with a woman, the son said, his father climbed out of the car and shot Noguera twice in the chest. The father then yelled at his son, “Shoot, coward, this is your mother’s killer!”

Orellana said he recognized Noguera as one of the men who killed his mother but did not want to shoot him. He said he finally fired twice, missing both times. The woman accompanying Noguera was not hurt.

Orellana and his father moved back to Guatemala, where a year later his father was killed, allegedly by friends or relatives of Noguera.

Afraid for his life, Orellana moved back to California before resettling in Oregon in 1993.

During last week’s Juvenile Court hearing, Detective Theodore Ball testified that a cousin of Orellana told police that Orellana and his father admitted killing Noguera and that young Orellana said he “was very happy that he participated.”

But a psychiatrist appointed by the court for the defense testified that she believed Orellana was forced by his father to participate in the killing, and that he was suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome as a result of having seen his family massacred.

“I am not convinced that he killed anyone,” said Jean E. Carlin.