Guilty Plea in Casino Slaying

In a surprise last-minute plea bargain that spared him a possible death sentence, Long Beach teenager Jeremy Strohmeyer admitted Tuesday that he sexually assaulted and strangled a 7-year-old Los Angeles girl in a Nevada casino last year.

Strohmeyer agreed to spend the rest of his life in prison without the possibility of parole for the slaying of Sherrice Iverson--a case that has spurred nationwide debate about Good Samaritan laws, tougher parental supervision and better security in casinos.

“This gentleman will never be able to hurt another child again,” Clark County Dist. Atty. Stewart Bell told a phalanx of reporters who greeted him after the plea was entered in a packed courtroom Tuesday morning.

The 19-year-old Strohmeyer, whose case had been badly hurt by recent court rulings against him, stood stone-faced in court with his arms folded as he entered his pleas just 90 minutes before his murder trial was scheduled to begin. He gave somber, terse responses and closed his eyes repeatedly as District Judge Myron E. Leavitt asked him dozens of questions--some mundane, others graphic--about the terms of the agreement.

“Guilty,” Strohmeyer answered four times in a monotone when asked how he pleaded to four counts of kidnapping, sexually assaulting and murdering Sherrice on May 25, 1997, at what was then called the Primadonna Resort & Casino in Primm, Nevada, near the California border.

She had been playing in the casino’s arcade area about 3:45 a.m., watched by her older half-brother, while her father gambled at the slot machines. Strohmeyer began a sort of cat-and-mouse game with her for about 10 minutes and then followed her into the women’s restroom before molesting and killing her in a stall, authorities say.

Strohmeyer and a friend, David Cash, had been hanging out in the arcade during a brief stop on a trip to Las Vegas with Cash’s father. After he returned to Long Beach at the end of the Memorial Day weekend, Strohmeyer confessed his crimes to several friends and ultimately to authorities who apprehended him and sent him back to Nevada.

“You understand,” the judge told the onetime West Point hopeful, “that ‘without the possibility of parole’ means just what it says: You have to spend the rest of your natural life in prison?”

“Yes, sir,” Strohmeyer answered.

Mixed Reaction to Plea Bargain

Relatives of Strohmeyer and Sherrice cringed, sniffling quietly on occasion, as court officials discussed the chilling details of the sexual crimes that the teenager perpetrated on his 46-pound victim.

The relatives were quickly escorted out of the courtroom without speaking to reporters. A Los Angeles community leader who spoke on behalf of Sherrice’s mother, Yolanda Manuel, said she was satisfied with the agreement because “we’ve gotten peace for Sherrice.”

Leroy Iverson, the girl’s father, was relieved by Strohmeyer’s plea, said his lawyer, Winston Kevin McKesson. Iverson told his attorney that “killing that boy won’t bring my baby back.” Iverson himself was faulted for having left his daughter in the casino in the pre-dawn hours. But Nevada authorities decided last year not to charge him with child neglect.

Strohmeyer’s plea drew criticism from activists from South-Central Los Angeles who have followed the case closely and who traveled to Las Vegas for the trial. Several questioned whether the killer would have escaped death if his victim were not poor and black. And they said they were disappointed that details of the crime--including the role of Strohmeyer’s friend Cash, who has admitted witnessing part of the struggle but failing to intercede at the casino--would not get a public airing.

“We’ll never really know what a heinous crime it was,” said Molly Bell, a Compton activist who was at the trial with members of her church. “Why did they need to make a deal when you had everything--videotape, a confession, everything--in your favor? It’s not right.”

John Crutchfield, a high school volleyball coach and mentor of Strohmeyer, lamented that his former student “is going to die a different, slow and painful death inside the walls of a prison.

“Life without possibility of parole for a 19-year-old kid is worse. That’s worse than the death penalty,” Crutchfield said.

The agreement capped four days of secret negotiations between defense attorneys and prosecutors in an effort to avoid what officials said probably would have been the most costly and closely watched trial in Las Vegas history.

The talks began last Friday, when a defense attorney approached a prosecutor about discussing a plea.

There had been no serious discussions on the subject before that, attorneys said, but the defense team had been hit with a series of pretrial setbacks in recent weeks, including a little-noticed ruling by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor denying a request for a review of the legality of a search warrant in the case.

Worst-Case Scenario

The final blow came Thursday when Leavitt reiterated in court that prosecutors would be allowed to introduce evidence taken from Strohmeyer’s computer, including his alleged admission to another Internet user just two days before the Nevada trip that he had fantasized about 5- and 6-year-old girls.

Given that evidence and the procedural laws in Nevada that worked against Strohmeyer, defense attorney Leslie Abramson said Tuesday that the best conclusion the defense could realistically hope for was 75 years in prison. The worst-case scenario was the very real possibility of a death sentence.

Co-defense attorney Richard Wright, a Las Vegas lawyer who has known Bell for years, approached the district attorney during last-minute preparations for the trial. The pair retreated to a hallway in the judge’s chambers to talk privately for about half an hour.

“Quite frankly, we were surprised they didn’t approach us earlier,” Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. William Koot said in an interview. “We knew they were going for a hung jury, and once they lost on the 4th Amendment issue [regarding the admissibility of the Internet material], they lost all hope.”

Initially, the defense offered to have Strohmeyer agree to a life-without-parole sentence in pleading guilty to the murder and kidnapping counts--but not sexual assault, Koot said.

“We said no,” Koot said. “We wanted to make sure he pleaded guilty to everything he did.”

They would agree to drop the death penalty--but only if Strohmeyer acknowledged his sexual crimes as well.

Prosecutors were willing to spare Strohmeyer’s life, Bell said, because a death sentence was not a sure thing in light of the defendant’s youth and possible appeals by the defense. “It’s easy to say you can impose death. It’s harder to do. This was the best of all worlds,” he said.

Strohmeyer’s parents flew to Las Vegas on Friday night and met with their son and his lawyers in jail to discuss his options. They did not appear to have many, Abramson said in an interview.

After back-and-forth discussions through the holiday weekend, the deal was completed Monday. Strohmeyer grimly accepted it--for his parents as much as anything else, Abramson said.

“He was resigned. He knew what he had to do. He could not put his parents through a death watch,” she said in an interview.

Sentencing Set for Oct. 14

Formal sentencing will not come until Oct. 14, but Strohmeyer realizes the dire consequences of his plea, Abramson said. “He’s gone. There’s no question about it. We made it very clear to him that he’ll never get out,” she said.

Strohmeyer’s only real regret in accepting the deal, Abramson said, was that there will not be a trial to serve as a warning to teenagers about corrupting influences that he claims contributed to his slide in the months before the murder.

Abramson insisted that drugs, alcohol, Internet pornography and insecurity over his adoption, among other factors, triggered the slide of a once responsible young man who was mentally “gone” at the time he killed and molested Sherrice in the bathroom stall that May morning.

“In truth and in fact, what we believe--and whether we could convince a jury of this, I don’t know--is this kid was not there [mentally] during any sex acts and when she died . . . was in a daze.”

Online services that allow children to view pornography on the Internet, for example, “have a great deal to answer for,” Abramson said. So do an unlicensed therapist and a psychiatrist who misdiagnosed Strohmeyer’s mental condition before the murder and prescribed amphetamines at a time when he was already on speed, she said.

Controversy Over Friend

“Then there is David Cash, who was not a witness but a co-perpetrator,” she told reporters outside the courthouse. That remark drew cheers from several Los Angeles activists who want Cash prosecuted for failing to help Sherrice. Others have unsuccessfully lobbied to have Cash expelled from UC Berkeley.

Elaborating later, Abramson said Cash has given numerous conflicting accounts over the last 16 months about what happened at the casino, suggesting that Strohmeyer’s friend had a direct role in the molestation and perhaps the killing. Bell, for his part, said prosecutors would be willing to look at any evidence presented to them concerning Cash’s alleged involvement.

But Cash’s lawyer, Mark Werksman, said Abramson was trying to lessen Strohmeyer’s responsibility for his actions.

“They can lash out as much as they want, but at the end of the day, Jeremy Strohmeyer alone killed Sherrice Iverson,” Werksman said. “It seems strange and inappropriate to blame everyone but Jeremy Strohmeyer, when he pled guilty to murder. He can blame everyone back to his kindergarten teacher, but he was alone in the bathroom with Sherrice and he killed her. He ultimately has to take responsibility for that.”

Upon being informed of Strohmeyer’s plea, Cash was relieved that he would not have to testify and “doesn’t have to subject himself to scrutiny,” Werksman said. “Now hopefully justice has been done and everybody can move on.”

Lichtblau reported from Las Vegas and Zamichow from Los Angeles.

A detailed report on Jeremy Strohmeyer and the murder of Sherrice Iverson is on The Times’ Web site. Go to https://www.latimes.com/jeremy