|
A crucial
prosecution witness testified Tuesday that in November 1988 she saw
seven persons making plans to steal from a construction site where
six firefighters later died in an explosion.
Among the seven
were Frank Sheppard, Skip Sheppard, Darlene Edwards, Bryan Sheppard
and Richard Brown. All five are on trial in federal court on charges
that they caused the explosion, and the account Tuesday was the first
in 14 days of testimony to link all five defendants in one place and time.
Outside the
courtroom, events took a strange turn. A witness's pickup truck was
doused with gasoline, Brown's bond was revoked after he argued with
Edwards' parents and an audience member threatened a prosecutor.
But the testimony
of Edwards' daughter, Becky Edwards, was the centerpiece of the day.
Becky Edwards lived with her mother and her mother's boyfriend, Frank
Sheppard, in November 1988, when she was 11.
Now 19, Becky
Edwards twisted a tissue in her hands as she testified. She said a
group gathered around her mother's kitchen table a week before Nov.
29, 1988.
"Who was
there?" Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul S. Becker asked.
Edwards replied:
"Frank, my mom, Skip (Sheppard), Richard (Brown), Bryan
(Sheppard), my brother Ronnie (Edwards), Allen (Bethard)."
Ronnie Edwards
later became an informant for federal agents in the case and made
undercover drug buys from his stepmother, Darlene Edwards, which
resulted in her drug conviction. Bethard was prosecuted by Becker on
a rarely filed federal theft charge after he refused to implicate
anyone in the explosion case.
"What were
they doing?" Becker asked.
"Getting
high," Becky Edwards said.
"What did
they say they were going to do?" Becker asked.
"They just
said there was copper and stuff that they could take and sell,"
Edwards said, "and there were some sheds."
"Who was
doing most of the talking?" Becker asked.
"Frank and
Richard," Edwards said.
Prosecutors
believe that when witnesses refer to "sheds," they mean the
two large steel boxes on the construction site that contained
dynamite and blasting caps. Defense lawyers have noted that no copper
was kept on the site where the blast occurred and that nothing was stolen.
Edwards started
crying as Becker asked her whether she remembered the explosions. She
said that after the second blast, "I went out of my bedroom, my
mom was coming down the hallway and Frank (Sheppard) was coming in
the front door. He had on jeans and a shirt. He had a tear in his
pant leg, and he had grass stains on his pants and shoes."
On
cross-examination, Edwards said groups gathered at her mother's house
nearly every night. "It wasn't really meetings," Becky
Edwards said. "They would just get high and look for ways to get money."
Edwards faced
little cross-examination and was on the witness stand only 15 minutes.
Earlier Tuesday,
Darlene Edwards' sister testified. Nancy Romi said that three to five
minutes after the first explosion, she saw a black pickup truck with
a headlight missing roar through her neighborhood.
"I said,
'There goes Richard,' " Romi testified. Brown drove a black Ford
pickup truck in November 1988.
After Romi was
finished, the trial took its customary midmorning break. A
confrontation during the break prompted the judge to order Brown, the
only defendant not being held in jail, into custody.
Brown later took
the witness stand and gave his account of the conflict.
He said he had
walked out of the courtroom talking to his cousin.
"I can't
believe her," Brown said of Romi. "She's a lying ... "
At one time, Romi was Brown's aunt by marriage.
Brown said Romi's
parents heard the remark and stood up in front of him. Brown said he
cursed them.
When the trial
resumed, Becker asked U.S. District Judge Joseph E. Stevens Jr. to
revoke Brown's bond. Becker said Brown had "engaged in a pattern
of conduct to intimidate the government's witnesses." He said
Brown had made an obscene gesture at a former girlfriend last week
and had glared at two other witnesses in a hallway Monday.
On the witness
stand, Brown denied gesturing or glaring. He said he had been under
great stress because, in addition to the trial, his 1-year-old son
was in an intensive care unit with a serious illness.
Stevens ordered
Brown into custody.
"I have an
obligation to preserve the integrity of this process and to protect
these witnesses," Stevens said. "It's been from the
testimony and my observation in this courtroom that this young man
doesn't have much control over himself."
An hour later,
when Romi left the courthouse, she found gasoline in the bed of her
pickup truck. The gas came from a 5-gallon can Romi kept in the truck.
Kansas City police
could not determine whether someone deliberately poured the gas or
whether the can tipped over. Romi's mother, Doris Clark, said the can
had survived a long ride to the courthouse and appeared to have been
emptied on purpose.
Police took a
report and called firefighters, who hosed down the truck bed.
Also during the
lunch hour, a defense attorney heard an audience member say something
like, "I want to kill Becker." Becker, the lead prosecutor,
did not hear the remark, but it was reported to Stevens.
"If I hear of
anyone tampering with, intimidating or having a conversation or
tampering with property of a witness," Stevens told the
courtroom, "I promise you I will deal with you in a way you will
never forget." |
