911 Call Sets Tragic Tone for ‘Wrong Way’ Murder Trial

The trial of four reputed gang members in the 1995 “wrong way” shooting death of 3-year-old Stephanie Kuhen got underway Tuesday with a haunting 911 emergency call that underscored how a family’s mistaken late-night turn down a crime-plagued street led to tragedy.

As the courtroom of Superior Court Judge Edward A. Ferns went silent, the voice of the young girl’s uncle, David Dalton, can be heard on the emergency tape as he pleads for help moments after the shooting.

But just as quickly as the family’s wrong turn onto a narrow Cypress Park dead-end street resulted in bloodshed, Dalton’s voice goes from calm to anguish as he realizes that one of more than a dozen bullets fired at the family’s late-model Thunderbird has killed his niece.

“We have two people who’ve been shot . . . they shot my friend and my niece, my little baby niece,” Dalton tells a Los Angeles police dispatcher after reaching the family’s nearby home. “We need people right now.”

As a paramedic dispatcher joins in to offer emergency assistance, Dalton grows increasingly frantic when he realizes that his niece is not breathing.

“She’s not awake!” Dalton yells, relaying what Robin Kuhen, the toddler’s mother, and others are telling him about Stephanie’s condition.

After more anxious moments, Dalton realizes that the girl may be dead. “She’s not breathing,” he tells the dispatcher before beginning to wail. “No! . . . No! . . . No!” he screams repeatedly.

On a day when both sides gave opening statements outlining their cases, the wrenching excerpt set the tone for a trial about a crime that shocked the nation and, in Deputy Dist. Atty. Pat Dixon’s words, illustrated the horrible consequence of two worlds in collision.

One world, Dixon told the six-man, six-woman jury, was that of an everyday mother and her daughter riding home in a family car after a birthday party that lasted late into the night.

The other, the prosecutor said, was the “ ‘in-your-face’ kind of world of the gang members” who ruled a narrow, dimly lighted street northeast of downtown Los Angeles as if it were priceless real estate.

It is the theory of Los Angeles police and prosecutors that the killing of Kuhen and the wounding of her younger brother, Joseph, and the car’s driver, Timothy Stone, occurred simply because--attempting to take a short cut home--they drove down a street that a large group of beer-drinking gang members claimed as their private domain.

“When all the evidence is present,” Dixon told the jurors in his opening statement, “you are going to agree on two things: One, that it is only by the grace of God more people weren’t killed, and two, that these defendants killed Stephanie Kuhen.”

Attorneys representing the four defendants--Anthony Gabriel Rodriguez, 28; Manuel Rosales Jr., 22; Hugo David Gomez and Augustin Lizama, both 17--challenged the jurors to put aside the desire to bring someone to justice and instead clearly analyze the reliability of the prosecution’s evidence.

“I don’t envy any of you. This is a horrible case. A horrible case,” Rosales’ attorney, Paul Catalano, told jurors. “But I’m going to ask you . . . to keep your intellect intact.”

One by one, defense attorneys raised a series of questions about the chronology of events outlined by authorities and the veracity of the prosecution’s key witnesses--two reputed gang members who say they saw the shooting.

One of the witnesses, defense attorneys pointed out, was granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for his testimony. And in the case of both witnesses, attorneys added, there are legitimate questions about how they could have been at the scene of the tragedy and not themselves have been charged along with the four defendants.

Defense attorneys also dismissed the prosecution’s theory that the shooting occurred because a group of young toughs--allegedly members of the Avenues street gang, some in a subset known as the Assassins--were determined to strike down anyone who came into their neighborhood uninvited.

To the contrary, defense attorneys said in their opening statements, the tragedy occurred because the defendants, like others on Isabel Street, had no idea who was in the car traveling slowly down the street and believed that their own lives were in danger.

“The evidence will show that this case is not about a lack of respect” for a neighborhood or those who live in it, Gomez’s attorney, Lawrence Forbes, said. “They were worried themselves, that they were going to be victims of a drive-by shooting.”

In addition, defense attorneys offered alternate explanations about their clients’ whereabouts at the time of the shooting and insisted that there were no eyewitnesses--except for the two reputed gang members who will testify--linking the defendants to the crime.

Stone, the prosecution’s first witness Tuesday, acknowledged under oath that he did not recognize any of the defendants. He did testify, however, that his car’s occupants made no menacing gestures as he drove slowly down the street before their exit was blocked by a trash can and shots rang out.

The trial is expected to last at least six weeks. In addition to the girl’s slaying, the four defendants are charged with the attempted murder of the car’s other occupants--Dalton, Stephanie’s mother, Robynn, her sons Christopher and Joseph, and Stone.

If convicted of all the charges, they would face life in prison without the possibility of parole.