Slain Youth’s Mother Tearfully Recalls Hearing Gunshots on Halloween : Trial: Pasadena woman says she ran to the scene without knowing her son was one of the three victims. Survivor of attack tells of seeing his friends fall.

The mother of one of three boys slain in a shooting on Halloween two years ago tearfully testified Thursday that she heard the spray of gunshots that night and ran down her Pasadena street to offer aid--not knowing that one of the dead children was her youngest son.

“I went to the first person and checked the pulse--there was no pulse,” said Deborah Bush, a longtime crime scene investigator for the Pasadena Police Department. Taking deep breaths as she started to weep on the stand, Bush told the court, “So I went to the second person and I saw it was my son. He had a bullet in his head and he was already gone.”

Testifying in the trial of three men accused of killing her son, Stephen Coats, 14, another 14-year-old, Reggie Crawford, and Edgar Evans, 13, Bush struggled to maintain her composure as she described offering the boys a ride home before the shooting. She had just returned from out of town when she drove up and saw her sons, trick-or-treat bags in tow, walking home from a birthday party with a large group of children, she said.

Stephen, “her jokester,” she said, answered for himself and his brother, Kenny.

“He said, ‘No, your car is so slow I can probably beat you home,’ ” Bush recalled, smiling at the memory. “I remember telling Kenny and Stephen that they couldn’t eat any candy until Mommy checked the bags.”

The next time she saw Kenny, police were holding him back from going near the bodies, she said. “He was hollering, ‘I want my brother; please don’t let this be my brother,’ ” she said.

Three defendants--Lorenzo Alex Newborn, 25, Karl Holmes, 20, and Herbert Charles McClain Jr., 26--have pleaded not guilty to murder and attempted murder in the case before Los Angeles Superior Court Judge J. D. Smith.

If convicted, each could face the death penalty.

Prosecutors contend that the attack on the boys was an act of revenge by a small, violent Pasadena gang after the killing of one of their cohorts. The victims, one of whom wore a black bandanna and another of whom carried a blue head covering, were mistaken for members of that rival gang, prosecutors have said.

Bush’s testimony came after one of the survivors of the attack, a boy who is now 15, took the witness stand.

The teen-ager described watching his friends fall, one by one, as the shots were fired.

“I heard a shot, a lot of shots,” said the youth, who was struck in the hand. “It sounded like a pack of firecrackers.”

Defendants Newborn and Holmes alternated between taking notes and watching the testimony. McClain, his chin resting in his hand, looked intently at the witness.

The teen-ager said that at first he didn’t realize the noises came from a gun. “Not until I seen Steve fall,” he told the courtroom.

When he saw another one of the boys go down, the witness said, he turned and ran into a nearby yard, away from the blue sparks emanating from a clump of bushes.

He emerged about a minute later, he said, and discovered the bodies of his dead and wounded friends scattered around the sidewalk.

The boy then described how he pulled the black bandanna off the head of one of his fallen friends and threw it and the blue bandanna he was carrying into some bushes.

He did not explain why he discarded the head coverings.

In earlier testimony Thursday, a prosecution witness who is a four-time felon described how Holmes bragged to him after the attack that he was among those who shot the children.

Derrick Tate acknowledged coming forward with his information, in a jailhouse interview with police, only after he had been arrested in Pasadena on an unrelated charge and held on an outstanding warrant in Illinois.

Defense attorneys have claimed that their clients have long been singled out for police harassment and that witnesses for the prosecution are unreliable because they were looking for police favors and reward money.

Two other defendants, Aurelius Bailey and Solomon Bowen, will be tried separately next month.

As jurors filed out in the short recess after Bush’s emotional testimony, those remaining in the courtroom could hear the mother’s sobs from the hallway outside. “It’s so hard,” Bush wailed. “It’s so hard.”