New Details Revealed About Larry (Leticia) King Murder
February 13, 2009
As I said in Tuesday’s post, most news articles about last February’s murder of Larry (Leticia) King has been somewhat biased. Both TIME and Newsweek published articles that attempted to shift blame from Brandon McInerney, the boy who pulled the trigger, and portray Larry as the aggressor. Even The Advocate got into the mix with a cover story called Who’s to Blame?.
Hopefully we can put that nonsense to rest now that Ventura County Deputy District Attorney Maeve Fox has filed a “statement of facts” with the court. Fox soundly refutes several assumptions and paints a clear picture of a bully gone over the edge. The Ventura County Star had the story Wednesday:
King was seen by McInerney and other classmates as effeminate and was of racially mixed heritage, with white and African-American ancestry, according to the court document.
“Larry and the defendant had several classes together and had an acrimonious relationship that was characterized by typical 8th grade back-and-forth insults — some sexual, some not,” the document states.
In the months and weeks before the shooting, King had begun to retort to the ongoing teasing, the document says.
Although King didn’t specifically target McInerney in his verbal sparring, he had words for other classmates, “many of whom tried to degrade and humiliate him to varying degrees on a daily basis,” the document says.
And then on the day before the murder…
A student witness described an argument between King and McInerney during their seventh-period class the day before the shooting. “The defendant was calling Larry derogatory names and Larry was ‘staring’ back at him,” the document says. After King got up and left, McInerney said: “I am going to shoot him,” the student told investigators, according to prosecutors.
A second student witness said she heard King tell McInerney “I love you” as they passed each other in the hallway. McInerney told the student witness that he was “going to get a gun and shoot” King.
Shortly after that, McInerney told a third student to “say goodbye to your friend Larry because you’re never going to see him again,” the document stated. The female student didn’t take the threat seriously.
McInerney is an “adherent of racist skinhead philosophy” and in his room detectives found Nazi, neo-Nazi and racist skinhead materials including books and writings from the Internet and copies of Hitler’s speeches, prosecutors stated.
Thursday’s article in the LA Times fleshed things out a bit more:
“In the days before the shooting, the defendant tried to enlist others to administer a beating to Larry,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Maeve Fox wrote in a “statement of facts” filed with the brief. “When that failed for lack of interest, he decided to kill Larry.”
Witnesses said King was usually not the aggressor. But after months of teasing by McInerney and other male students who called him “faggot,” he had began to retort, according to prosecutors.
The prosecution brief also reveals for the first time that McInerney was familiar with firearms, and that he had used that particular weapon in the past during target shooting with his family.
Investigators found a training video in his possession titled “Shooting in Realistic Environments,” as well as skinhead and neo-Nazi books and similar writings from the Internet, prosecutors wrote.
