Stabbing Death of Party Host Recounted

VAN NUYS â€”  In an emotional opening to the trial of three teenagers charged with killing a Woodland Hills party host, a prosecutor recounted how the victim spent his final moments fending off attackers with a baseball bat before being overpowered and stabbed in the heart.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Lea Purwin D’Agostino told jurors how Michael Baker, 19, Christopher Bryan Paonessa, 18, and Dino Ferrari Riggio came to Jason Shaw’s home armed with knives, sticks and a club to exact revenge for a dispute that began earlier that evening over laughing gas.

As a large contingent of family and friends looked on, D’Agostino also detailed how Shaw was alerted by others attending a birthday party at the Sylvan Street residence seconds before the defendants “came crashing through his bedroom door.�

Shaw and several friends “looked frantically for something with which to defend themselves,� she said, “but the only thing they had was a barbell and baseball bat in the closet.�

When the brawl ended, she said, Shaw lay dying in his backyard from two stab wounds, D’Agostino said. Daniel Parkison, expected to testify along with 40 other prosecution witnesses during the six-week trial, survived with six stab wounds.

Defense lawyers acknowledged the death was a tragedy, and the decision by the three co-defendants and 10 other youths “ill-fated and reckless.� But they also insisted each of their clients were not involved in the killing that they said occurred in “chaos, confusion and pandemonium.�

In August, three Simi Valley men--Bryan Zoltan Dyer, Jose David Lucas and Frederick James Estrada, each 18--pleaded guilty to conspiracy and were sentenced to a year in County Jail.

Five others, including one juvenile, face assorted charges including conspiracy, residential burglary and assault with a deadly weapon in connection with the attack.