Lawyer Says Client Saw Slayings of 2 Teenagers

In the most detailed account yet of the events leading up to the deaths of two La Crescenta boys on a school playground, the defense attorney for the sole murder suspect in the case described how the tragedy followed a long round of drinking and drug use.

Charles T. Mathews, counsel for 15-year-old Michael Demirdjian, proclaimed his client’s innocence but said the youth had witnessed the killings, which Mathews maintained were committed by an adult acquaintance.

“It happened very quickly,” the lawyer said in an interview at his Pasadena office.

The bodies of Blaine Talmo Jr., 14, and Chris McCulloch, 13, were found July 23 on the secluded playground of Valley View Elementary School in the Glendale portion of the La Crescenta community.

Mathews said the victims were attacked after consuming liquor and marijuana, which had made them drowsy.

“Strangulation was the incapacitating factor; the instrument of death was something else,” he said. “My client says they were choked out and then clubbed with a rock.”

Demirdjian, his senses dulled by marijuana and alcohol, was confounded and paralyzed by the brutality of the attack, Mathews said.

“He feared to do anything for fear the guy would do the same thing to him,” the lawyer said.

Mathews conceded that police may have physical evidence linking his client to the scene, including a bloody shoe. He said Demirdjian had checked one of the boys bleeding on the ground and thought he might be barely alive, and then fled to his home only a few hundred feet down the street.

The Glendale Police Department has imposed a news blackout on the case, citing the continuing investigation, and department spokesmen did not return calls for comment on Mathews’ remarks.

In addition to Demirdjian, Glendale police have arrested six other people in the case, according to the district attorney’s office. But prosecutors have declined to file charges related to the deaths against any of the others.

The only one of the six still in custody has been charged with burglary in an unrelated case.

Demirdjian pleaded not guilty Tuesday to charges of murder with special circumstances and robbery in the deaths.

Mathews faxed a letter to Glendale police Wednesday requesting that his client undergo a polygraph test to prove his innocence. Police had not responded by Wednesday night, the lawyer said.

Mathews said Demirdjian, the two victims and the adult acquaintance--whom he did not identify--were the only people on the school playground at the time of the attack.

The lawyer described Demirdjian as a somewhat troubled only child, adopted by his Armenian parents as an infant, who has struggled with his ethnic identity. The youth is of mixed white and African American ancestry and speaks fluent Armenian, Mathews said.

Demirdjian lives in an ethnically mixed neighborhood where his neighbors are mostly white, Armenian and Korean.

“He experienced some difficulty in that neighborhood,” Mathews said. “He doesn’t appear to be black or white, and sometimes had trouble fitting in.”

A student at Voyager Charter School for at-risk students, Demirdjian played youth football and was named rookie of the year in his foothill league, Mathews said.

The lawyer acknowledged that Demirdjian sometimes used drugs.

In the hours preceding their deaths, Talmo and McCulloch walked with Demirdjian from New York Park in La Crescenta to Foothill Boulevard, where they went to a sandwich shop, Mathews said.

After stopping off at a market, they returned to the park to meet a friend, who did not show up, Mathews said. He said that as night fell, they walked to the schoolyard.

“On the way they acquired alcohol,” said Mathews, although he would not say how.

The adult acquaintance joined them sometime later and brought hard liquor, the lawyer said. Mathews said he did not know who supplied the marijuana that the four of them smoked.

When Talmo fell asleep and Demirdjian fell into a drug-induced stupor, an argument broke out between McCulloch and the adult, Mathews said.

“The perpetrator choked Chris out and as Chris was incapacitated, Blaine woke up and attempted to intervene,” Mathews said.

He said the adult dropped a concrete bench on McCulloch and struck him with a rock. “Then he finished off Blaine,” Mathews said.