Strangling of Teenager Recounted

The girlfriend of slain teenage police informant Chad MacDonald testified Monday that she heard her boyfriend struggling for breath as he was strangled in a Norwalk house where the youths had gone to buy methamphetamine.

The 18-year-old woman, identified in court only as Jane Doe, said she heard MacDonald gasping in the living room while she was tied and held in the kitchen. The woman, who was 16 during the March 1998 attack, said she begged her captor to cover her ears.

Her assailant at first agreed, but when he dropped his hands, the woman said, she could again hear the sound of MacDonald being strangled. Asked how she knew the noises were the sounds of one struggling to breathe, she answered that when they were strangling her later, she made the same noises.

Michael Martinez, 22; Jose A. Ibarra, 21; and Florence Noriega, 30, are accused of torturing and murdering MacDonald, who had been an informant for the Brea Police Department. They face the death penalty if convicted, and all have pleaded not guilty.

MacDonald’s body was found in a South Los Angeles alley after the Yorba Linda 17-year-old went to the suspected drug house. His girlfriend was raped, shot in the jaw and left for dead in the Angeles National Forest, but was able to crawl out of a culvert to find help.

She testified that she and MacDonald had been smoking methamphetamine, drinking and hanging out with the defendants at the Halcourt Avenue house before the trio turned on them.

Doe said Noriega accused them of being police informants, and the group then bound and beat them. She said Martinez kept her in the kitchen, where her hands were tied with MacDonald’s belt.

As she heard MacDonald struggling, Martinez told her they would not kill her or MacDonald, and that they planned to let them go. She said Martinez told her: “Don’t worry, we’re just going to teach your boyfriend a lesson.”

Ibarra’s defense attorney, Forrest Latiner, said that showed the three did not intend to kill MacDonald. Latiner described MacDonald as “a 112-pound weakling with a toxic level of meth in his system” who died from what his attackers meant to be a nonfatal beating.

Comparing MacDonald to his girlfriend, who was also attacked by the group, prosecutors say, Latiner asked, “Why did she survive?”

But Doe testified that her alleged assailants switched back and forth from telling her she would be spared to threatening to kill her.

Doe said she heard Noriega ordering one of the others to load a gun to be used on her. She said Noriega, referring to her, told the men: “She’ll take five bullets, so load it all the way up.”

Doe said that after raping her in the house, the three put her in a car and drove her to the forest. While lying on the floor of the car with a towel covering her head, Doe said, she felt a gun poking her body and heard Noriega ask her: “You’re soft. Where do you want it?”

She said Noriega also tried to strangle her in the car with a rope, but stopped after she repeatedly kicked.

When they arrived at the forest, Doe said Martinez told her they would let her go, and that she should crawl into a culvert, because “your boyfriend’s at the other end.”

In the tunnel, however, Martinez shoved her to the ground and held her down by her shoulders, Doe testified. She said Noriega then tried to strangle her again, and she heard Noriega tell the others: “God, this girl won’t die.”

Doe said she passed out and then was shot in the face.

MacDonald agreed to work as an informant for the Brea police after he was arrested in January 1998 on charges of methamphetamine possession. Brea police officials have said the teenager worked as an informant only once--on a drug buy--and had stopped working for them weeks before the murder.

His death prompted a 1998 state law restricting the use of minors as police informants.

The law bars the use of children 12 and under, and requires police to get permission from a judge to use informants from 13 to 17 years old.