Slain Officers’ Parents Tell of Pain : Trial: Many jurors shed tears during survivors’ testimony. Panel will recommend whether convicted killer of Compton policemen should get death penalty.

After sitting through several weeks of testimony detailing the execution-style slaying of two Compton police officers, the jury that will recommend whether the officers’ killer should die heard a different tale Wednesday--the tragic stories of those who were left behind.

One after another, the mothers and fathers of Officers James Wayne MacDonald and Kevin Michael Burrell took the stand to cry out their losses. Three could not complete their testimony without breaking down so badly that court recessed. Burrell’s mother told how she had heard the shots that killed her son a few blocks from her home. MacDonald’s father, sobbing uncontrollably, blurted, “Come home, Jimmy, let me trade places with you,” when he was asked what he would tell his son if he could bring him back. The other parents cried with him, and in the audience the killer’s mother sobbed openly.

James and Tonia MacDonald told how they visit their son’s grave twice each day in their hometown of Santa Rosa, just to chat. Clark and Edna Burrell told how neither of them can bear to visit the cemetery where their son now lies.

At least half of the Los Angeles Superior Court jurors, who earlier this month convicted Regis Deon Thomas of the murders and must now recommend whether he spends his life in prison or is put to death, shed tears by the end of the day’s testimony.

For more than two years since Burrell and MacDonald were shot during a seemingly routine traffic stop Feb. 23, 1993, they have been remembered as police officers, stalwart and full of promise.

With trembling voices, the parents of both men Wednesday remembered them as sons, and then relived their pain as Deputy Dist. Atty. Mark Arnold asked each of them to remember the night of the murders.

State law allows “victim impact” to be taken into account by a jury when it is evaluating whether the death penalty is appropriate.

“Kevin always wanted to be a police officer. From the time he was 4 or 5 years old,” Clark Burrell recalled. “He would get mad at his older brother when Dennis would baby-sit him. He would tell us, when he got to be a policeman, Dennis would be the first one he locked up.”

Clark Burrell recalled that Kevin Burrell stopped by his parents’ house nearly every day to play dominoes and talk about his job. Hours before they were murdered, Burrell and MacDonald stopped by Burrell’s parents’ house in Compton for their dinner break. After eating a big meal, they simply waved and went back to their shifts.

Within hours, both men lay dead on the rain-wet pavement after stopping Thomas’ pickup truck. According to trial testimony, Thomas pulled a gun on the officers as they attempted to handcuff him. Thomas shot each officer in the head as they lay prone in the street.

“I heard the shots,” Edna Burrell said. Then she told how she reasoned that her son had been hit. “I was listening to my police scanner,” she said, “and I knew it was Kevin because I didn’t hear them call his name” on other dispatch calls. “So when she [a police officer] knocked on my door, all I could do is scream, ‘Oh God, they shot my baby.’ ”

With that, Edna Burrell broke down. Overwhelmed, she was led from the courtroom, past where Thomas sat staring straight ahead. Sobbing softly, she repeated what she had said on the stand: “How could he do that? How could he do that?”

Thomas, a 23-year-old San Pedro resident at the time of the killing, said he was able to shoot the officers at the traffic stop because they “slipped,” according to trial testimony.

Since the killings, the Burrells have attended one memorial service after another and their house in Compton has become a kind of shrine, they said. The walls are filled with photographs of Kevin, memorial plaques and displays featuring his police cap, handcuffs and billy club.

“I can look around just about every corner of the house and I can see him,” Clark Burrell said.

Both sets of parents said the deaths of their sons left them feeling empty, lost and angry.

“The whole time I was praying, just to let Jimmy live until I could see him again,” Tonia MacDonald sobbed, remembering the hours after she was told about the shooting. “And then I was so mad at God. All I wanted was to see him one more time.

“When he went to heaven,” she added, “he reached down into my heart and tore a piece of it out and took it with him.”

All four parents said old friends have fallen away as grief consumed their lives.

Mother’s Day, James MacDonald testified, has become unbearable.

“This year, when I got up, I didn’t tell her [his wife] ‘Happy Mother’s Day’ because it’s a tough day,” he said. “I could see the tears in her eyes.

“I resent being around people having a good time because Jimmy can’t have a good time,” he said. “My wife and I, we spend all of our holidays alone.”