Teen May Face Trial as Adult in Claes Slaying

A 16-year-old former Tustin High School student who had developed a recent fascination for guns was charged Wednesday with firing the shot that killed 14-year-old Carl Dan Claes in a secluded area of Lemon Heights last week.

The Orange County district attorney’s office filed murder charges against Thomas (Tommy) Miller, and accused his 15-year-old brother and a 17-year-old friend of aiding him after the slaying. Tommy Miller was also accused of robbery and personal use of a firearm in the attack, which investigators say followed a dispute over the victim’s $2,500 sound system.

Prosecutors have asked that Tommy Miller be tried as an adult.

“He qualifies because of his age, and because of the nature of the charges,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Carolyn Kirkwood.

The other two boys are not identified because they are not being charged as adults.

The three youths, all from Tustin, are expected to appear at a Juvenile Court detention hearing today, she said.

Tommy Miller, a onetime Little League baseball player and avid skateboarder who attended Tustin High School before he was expelled from the school district, changed markedly in the past few years, friends and former classmates say. After enduring an early childhood rife with domestic abuse, he had turned to graffiti tagging and last year began showing off a gun, some said.

“He used to be just a normal kid. Then he got into gangster stuff,” said one former friend.

“Tommy’s been going kind of crazy lately,” another said. “He hangs out with gangsters.”

Divorce records show that Tommy and his brother were exposed to violence on many occasions. Their mother, Dawn Marie Miller, contended in court documents that that she was beaten by the boys’ father, Thomas Donald Miller, at least six times in 1984.

On one occasion, Thomas Miller stabbed her in the leg with a knife, divorce records show. Thomas Miller later pleaded guilty to assault with a deadly weapon for that attack, court records show.

Katie Griffin, 20, a cousin of the 17-year-old youth charged with aiding Tommy Miller and receiving the stolen .22-caliber handgun authorities believe was the murder weapon, said she was at the Miller home about a month ago, when Tommy Miller began talking tough. The 17-year-old had been living with the Miller brothers, their father and their grandmother.

“Tommy was over here just saying that killing people is cool, that it makes you cool,” Griffin said as she loaded her cousin’s stereo, rock posters and tennis shoes into her pickup truck Wednesday. “I just said, ‘O.K. Whatever.’ ”

Tommy Miller’s aunt, however, painted a different picture of the suspects. Sally Velky described her nephews as “kind and gentle” and downplayed reports that Tommy Miller brawled with his father.

“They are not mean kids. They are kind, gentle and caring. They took care of their grandmother, waited on her hand and foot,” Velky said. “I can’t see them doing anybody any harm.”

As for a recent fistfight between father and son, Velky said: “There was some sort of fight, but I don’t know what it was all about. Everyone raises their children differently.”

Claes’ body was found last Wednesday in a Lemon Heights ditch about three miles from his Tustin home. He had been shot once in the head at close range. Sheriff’s investigators announced Tuesday that they had arrested the three suspects, calling the crime a senseless act of violence that had not been motivated by gang or drug activity.

Investigators said they recovered the handgun they believe is the murder weapon Monday night after serving a search warrant on the Tustin home of a fourth youth, who was not charged in the case. The 17-year-old was arrested at that house.

The stereo equipment was confiscated last Thursday at a location investigators declined to reveal. Claes had lent the 6-foot long mobile sound system--purchased by his grandfather for $2,500 and used at dance parties to play and record rap music--to the suspects about a week before he was killed.

Kirkwood said she will ask the court to consider the “records” of Tommy Miller’s alleged accomplices and commit them to “the maximum term of confinement in the California Youth Authority.”

Claes, who had recently transferred to A.G. Currie Middle School, lived alone with his grandfather, his legal guardian, in Tustin. His mother, who works for the U.S. Forest Service in the northern California town of Sonora, had been planning to move him there at the end of the school year.

In interviews with schoolmates and neighbors, a picture emerged Wednesday of Claes as a youngster who had begun hanging around with an older, tougher crowd several months ago.

In his quest for new acceptance, he met Tommy Miller.

Claes was at a party in March where Tommy Miller allegedly showed off a chrome pistol to former classmates from Tustin High School, several classmates recalled. When an older youth at the party talked of getting out of a gang, Claes said the opposite, according to a former classmate of Tommy Miller’s who asked not to be identified.

“He said what he wanted to do was get into gangs,” said the youth whose younger brother went to school with Claes. “It sounded really dumb.”

Others said Claes was a regular kid who liked baseball cards, roller hockey and paint ball shooting. But the youngster was developing a tougher attitude, friends said.

“Carl was always trying to find new friends. He was always trying to be cool,” said one teen-ager.

All three suspects attended the Tustin branch of the county’s Horizon Education Center, said school officials, who have declined to release their school records, saying they are confidential.

The 17-year-old suspect liked to skateboard, play the guitar and drums and draw, his cousin said. He worked at a local Marie Callender’s restaurant but quit recently, she said.

Griffin said her cousin told other family members that Tommy Miller gave him the gun the day after Claes was killed and told him to sell it. She said he also gave her cousin Claes’ pager. But the 17-year-old has insisted he knew nothing of the slaying at that time, Griffin said.

As Griffin removed her cousin’s belongings from the Miller home and garage in the 13400 block of Woodland Avenue in Tustin, Thomas Miller and the suspects’ grandmother remained inside. They declined to speak to reporters.

Records show that Thomas Miller and Dawn Marie Miller, both from Chicago, were married for four years before divorcing in 1981. On Dec. 28, 1983, they remarried and remained together for nine months before divorcing again, according to divorce records.

Dawn Miller alleged in court documents that her son returned home with a cigarette burn mark on his face after a 1985 visit to his father. Tommy Miller’s younger brother had a cut on his face, she claimed.

She contended the children were evasive when she asked them about the injuries and indicated in court documents that she believed they were caused by her former husband, divorce records show.

On another occasion, Dawn Marie Miller said her former husband broke into her home and began fighting with her, striking her in the eye, she contended in court documents.

In court documents, Thomas Miller contended he had never beaten either of his children and said the burn on his older son’s face was accidentally caused when the child “ran into a cigarette” the father had in his hand, records show.

Superior Court documents show that Thomas Miller has been arrested twice.

On Dec. 12, 1984, while under a restraining order to stay away from his wife, he was arrested for beating, kicking and stabbing her in their Tustin home, apparently over a dispute about the restraining order, according to court documents.

He later pleaded guilty to assault with a deadly weapon and was sentenced to a 130-day jail term and three years probation.

Little more than a year later, on Dec. 14, 1985, Thomas Miller was arrested again by Tustin police for violating a second restraining order and was ordered to spend another 36 days in jail.

Times staff writers Susan Marquez Owen and H.G. Reza also contributed to this article.