Gang-Rape Trial Jury Sees Video

One man grimaced but kept watching. A woman shuddered, wiped her eyes, then seemed to force herself to turn back to the screen.

But most of the jurors hid their thoughts and emotions Tuesday as they watched a videotape purported to show three young men, including an Orange County assistant sheriff’s son, raping an unconscious 16-year-old girl.

It was the first time that jurors were shown the much-discussed video, though the public was not permitted to see the footage.

Still, the public and the press remained in the courtroom Tuesday while the four-woman, eight-man jury watched the 20 minutes of videotape shot in the garage of Assistant Sheriff Don Haidl’s Corona del Mar home.

Haidl was not home during the Fourth of July weekend in 2002 when his son, Gregory Scott Haidl, 18, is alleged, along with Kyle Joseph Nachreiner and Keith James Spann, both 19, to have sexually assaulted the girl on a couch and a pool table. At the time, the three defendants lived in the Rancho Cucamonga area. Each defendant faces a maximum 55-year prison sentence if convicted on all counts.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Dan Hess told jurors Monday, the trial’s opening day, that the boys are shown having sex with the girl as she lies limp with closed eyes, then raping her with various objects -- including a bottle, a pool cue and a lighted cigarette.

Defense attorneys contend that the girl was pretending to be unconscious and that the encounter was consensual, part of an orgy that the girl orchestrated herself.

On Tuesday afternoon, the courtroom was silent except for the rap music and conversation blaring from the three TV monitors positioned around the jury box.

The footage starts with one boy giggling, followed by a pause, then the girl says, “You’re trying to take off my clothes, huh, Greg?” Her tone seems to be teasing, not indignant, and she adds a few seconds later, “I am so [expletive] up.”

She is not heard during the rest of the video. The boys speak occasionally, and luridly. Three times one can hear a spanking sound. While the video played, Nachreiner scrawled notes and ignored the monitors. Spann and Haidl mostly stared at their hands, occasionally sneaking glances at the jurors or the video.

Near the end of the video, one female juror appeared to twist her lips in disgust, then turned and narrowed her eyes at the defendants before turning back to the monitor.

Before the video was played, the prosecution tried to establish how the authorities got their hands on the tape.

Kevin Rogers, 20, testified that the day after the incident, Nachreiner, a high school classmate, and Haidl came over in the early morning to a house in Newport Beach that Rogers and some friends had rented for the summer. Rogers said he later returned to see three of his roommates watching the footage on a different video camera. He said he watched the video for about 10 minutes before going surfing.

Around dusk, Rogers said, Haidl and Nachreiner returned and started looking in cabinets and under beds for that camera. They were both “apprehensive,” Rogers testified. “Kind of shaky.”

A second prosecution witness, 20-year-old Lindsay Picou, testified that by that time, she had wrapped the same camera, containing the tape, in a towel and locked it in her car. Picou, who at the time was the girlfriend of one of the other summer renters, testified that after seeing the tape she wanted to make sure law enforcement saw it. She said she was appalled the first time she saw the video.

Defense lawyers are depicting the girl as a porn star wannabe who only pretended to be unconscious.

Peter Morreale, Spann’s attorney, said his client and the girl met to have sex a few times at her request in the month before the incident.

He said the prosecution’s contention that the defendants targeted the girl to drug and rape her was ludicrous because, he said, she called Nachreiner from her cellphone as she drove toward Corona del Mar and said she was planning to have sex with all three boys that evening.

Both sides agree that during a party at the same house the day before the alleged rape, the girl swam nude with Nachreiner and had sex with Haidl and Spann. They dispute whether she also had sex with Nachreiner.

She told police, Morreale said, that she did not think she had been raped the next night.

“If they did give me something,” he said she told investigators, “there was no need, because I would have done it anyway.”