Killer Described as a Caring Counselor

In the months and years leading up to the slaying of Ventura County Sheriff’s Deputy Peter J. Aguirre, Michael Raymond Johnson was a sympathetic and effective volunteer drug and alcohol counselor, his former boss testified Thursday.

“I thought he was superior,” said Robert Holts, Johnson’s former supervisor at a Salvation Army adult alcohol and drug rehabilitation center in Carpinteria. “He was very committed.”

Last month, a jury convicted Johnson of killing Aguirre when the officer answered a domestic disturbance call in Meiners Oaks. Aguirre was shot through the head before he had a chance to draw his gun.

In the first days of the penalty trial, prosecutors called friends and relatives of Aguirre, who tearfully recounted how the death of the 26-year-old deputy has destroyed their lives.

Thursday’s witnesses were called in an attempt by defense attorneys to portray Johnson as more than a killer.

Jurors will weigh the testimony when they decide whether to sentence Johnson to death or life in prison.

Holts said Johnson was an “extremely caring” counselor whose clients had the highest graduation rate of all the counselors.

“I know I had men come to me to ask to be placed on his caseload,” Holts testified.

Defense attorney Todd Howeth also has argued that Johnson suffered from delusions and paranoid schizophrenia for years--and did on the night of July 17, 1996--and thus does not deserve to die.

For example, 15 years ago in Wisconsin, Johnson harbored suspicions that fellow organic dairy farmers were trying to poison him, a defense witness testified Thursday.

Jane Siemon told the jury that, after she accidentally sent a thermos of bad pinto bean soup to her husband and Johnson as they worked in the woods, Johnson never ate her food again.

“After they came back to the house, Michael said I was trying to poison him,” she said. “From that point on he did his own cooking,” she said. His diet consisted mostly of pancakes.

Siemon was the latest witness defense attorneys called to testify that Johnson has long suffered from mental illness and bizarre delusions about food.

According to earlier testimony, he once told a prison guard that he was a “warrior for Krishna” trying to keep people from eating meat when he robbed a McDonald’s in 1986.

And he demanded that his parents remove bacon fat from the refrigerator because it was giving him bad dreams.

He also told a Ventura County mental health expert that he is engaged in a battle between the organics, who have been forced underground, and the non-organics, who rule the world.

Defense testimony will continue today.