Second Mistrial Declared in Shooting Case

The retrial of two gang members accused of the stray-bullet shooting that nearly killed a fifth-grade teacher this year in full view of his class ended Monday with another hung jury and continued suggestions of witness intimidation.

Ten months after the shooting of Alfredo Perez sparked international expressions of outrage, Compton Superior Court Judge John E. Leahy declared a second mistrial, with the jury hopelessly deadlocked 9 to 3 in favor of acquittal. The case returns to court on Jan. 14, when the judge will decide whether to dismiss the case or honor a possible request from the district attorney’s office to try the case a third time.

As in the first trial, the key testimony against defendants Antonio Moses and Frazier Francis came from a witness who, when placed under oath, drastically changed the story he had initially told police.

On Feb. 22, the day of the shooting, witness James McClenand told police he saw Francis fire shots on a dare at a rival gang member who was driving by. A bullet missed the car, traversed several lanes of traffic, went through a library window at Figueroa Street Elementary School and hit Perez as he was standing before his class.

McClenand’s initial statement seemed to clearly implicate Moses and Francis. But when he got to the witness stand, McClenand, who lives in the defendants’ neighborhood, altered his story, saying he never actually saw the shooting but only heard it.

Perez was wounded so badly he was not expected to live, but doctors at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center saved his life. Prayers for his remarkable recovery came from as far away as the Vatican, and Perez now can walk with the aid of a cane and speak.

McClenand was brought in as a witness shortly after the shooting, when police rounded up so many people from the neighborhood around the school that the witness would later compare the scene at the police station to “a block party.�

There, at the LAPD Southeast Division substation, McClenand told police he saw Moses order Francis, both of the Denver Lane Bloods, to shoot a member of the rival Hoover Crips.

On the witness stand, Deputy Dist. Atty. Laura Laesecke pressed McClenand to explain the discrepancy between his testimony and his earlier statement to police. McClenand replied that he blurted out his initial statement because he was afraid the police would blame the shooting on him.

“I was scared,� said McClenand, 19. “I thought they gonna set me up. Be another O.J. They said I was gonna do 30, 50 years for this. . . . Damn, this was the first time I was ever even in jail.�

Repeatedly he was asked if it was true that Francis fired the shots. Much more emphatically than in the first trial, McClenand denied that, and at one point, changed his story entirely.

“Come to think of it, he wasn’t the shooter. No, he’s not the shooter,� said McClenand, who occasionally looked at the defendants.

When asked why Francis would have run toward the passing rival, McClenand said: “I thought maybe he was gonna slug him.�

During the first trial, the father of defendant Moses--a man who was himself a founding member of the Piru Street gang in Compton--said that McClenand had placed himself in mortal danger by testifying, adding that if either of the defendants were to be convicted, McClenand would “probably be iced.�

But McClenand, substantially more relaxed at the second trial, denied that he or his family had been threatened.

“I heard rumors that they were gonna blow my head off, but no one messed with me,� said McClenand, who still lives in the neighborhood and is not a gang member.