Defendant’s Wife Says She Warned Deputy About Armed Spouse

Just before he died, Ventura County Sheriff’s Deputy Peter J. Aguirre Jr. answered a domestic call with his gun still holstered--despite warnings that an armed man waited inside, the defendant’s estranged wife testified Wednesday.

She let Aguirre into her house in Meiners Oaks on July 17 and told him and another deputy that Michael Raymond Johnson was inside, armed with two pistols.

As Aguirre walked past her through the front hallway, his hands empty, “I moved to the side,” said the woman, who asked that her name be withheld because she has accused Johnson of raping her.

“At that moment, shots were heard,” the woman testified in Spanish through a court interpreter. “Everything was fast.”

Aguirre lay dying.

Seconds later, Johnson burst from the house naked and shooting at deputies, who felled him with a shotgun blast and took him into custody, investigators have said.

Johnson, 49, faces charges of murder, kidnap and spousal rape.

He also faces special allegations that he kidnapped his wife and killed a police officer--charges that could carry the death penalty if prosecutors choose to pursue it.

Johnson’s estranged wife testified all day Wednesday under questioning by Deputy Dist. Atty. Maeve Fox, describing Johnson’s behavior on the afternoon of the shooting.

The woman often dabbed tears from her eyes with a handkerchief as she spoke.

The woman testified that Johnson showed up the afternoon of July 17 at the house where she worked as a maid, a big gun tucked down the back of his shorts and a smaller one bulging beneath his vest.

He told her he had a pistol and followed her through the house, talking crazily, she testified, adding, “He said he wasn’t going to do anything to me.”

Johnson ordered his estranged wife to help him rob a bank, then talked wistfully about making a movie, she said.

He seemed calm until she tried to take away the pistols, “and that’s when he was mad at me,” she testified. He pulled out the clip to show it was full, she said.

She hurriedly called her adult daughter to warn that she was bringing Johnson home, and that he was carrying guns.

Then the woman got into the car with Johnson, because “if I refused to go with him, he was going to kill me and he was going to kill himself too,” she testified. “He was crazy. He didn’t know where we were going. He’d say that we were going to Wisconsin, or we’d go to Mexico.”

They arrived at her house on Encinal Avenue, and were met by her young nephews, her daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend.

Johnson signed over the deed to his car to the woman’s daughter, and told her to pack and take the others out of the house. But the younger woman began crying.

Johnson’s estranged wife, unable to get them to leave, persuaded Johnson to drive up California 33 and park beside a river, she testified.

They hiked a short distance from the car, and Johnson laid out a blanket, peering behind him because he thought that “someone was following him,” she said.

Johnson disrobed, motioning that she should take off her clothes too. Then, with the pistols lying beside him on the blanket, he climbed on top of her, the woman testified.

But Johnson proved temporarily impotent, and she said they soon put their clothes back on and drove home to find the house empty.

Her daughter phoned, asking if she was OK and wanting someone to call the police.

“She says [now] that I said yes, but I don’t remember,” the woman testified. The woman said she apparently told her daughter to summon police and warn them that Johnson was acting strangely and was talking about robbing a bank. Johnson pressed her for sex again, but she tried to get his mind off it by suggesting they take a shower, she said.

As they bathed, the phone rang again, and the woman answered. She said it was sheriff’s deputies. “They said to me, ‘Do you need help?’ ” she recalled. “I said, ‘Yes.’ ”

She got back in the shower for four or five minutes, then emerged and wrapped herself in a towel to answer a knock at the door. Johnson told her “he imagined it was the police.”

But she told him otherwise, “because I was afraid somebody would come, afraid he would hurt them or they would hurt him. I told him not to do anything.”

She answered the door, and there stood a dark-skinned deputy, later identified as Aguirre. She warned him about the guns, but he brushed past without drawing his own. Moments later, she testified, “shots were heard.”

Testimony is scheduled to continue this morning, under cross-examination by Deputy Public Defender Todd Howeth.