Thursday, April 11, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.
Nearly two years after the 19-year-old son of the then-chief of the North Las Vegas Police Department was executed on a lonely road northwest of Las Vegas, the trial began for the men charged in the slaying.
"Justin Lusch was left dead, face down in soft dirt at the edge of the roadway," Deputy District Attorney Doug Herndon told the jury Wednesday during opening statements.
Kevin Lisle and Jerry Lopez, both 25, face the possibility of the death penalty if they are convicted in District Judge Sally Loehrer's courtroom of Lusch's murder.
Herndon said that the defendants, who called themselves the "vatos," admitted to friends that they shot Lusch to death because they considered him to be a "snitch."
The prosecutor said the pair were small-time methamphetamine dealers who believed their activities had been compromised by Lusch's connection to his father.
The evidence at the trial, Herndon explained, will come primarily from the defendants' friends who congregated at the generally unsupervised home of one teenager where marijuana and methamphetamine were routinely used.
Herndon said that Lusch, like most of the young adults who would hang around or even sleep at the house, was having trouble getting along with his parents.
Lusch telephoned one of his friends the night of Aug. 21, 1994, to say he was going with the vatos to get some methamphetamine and would return in a few minutes. It was the last contact anyone had with him before he was killed by a bullet through his heart and two bullets in the back.
A truck driver traveling along Alexander Road to a gravel pit discovered the body the next morning.
Deputy Public Defender Rebecca Blaskey cautioned the jury that the testimony of several witnesses was suspect because it came as a result of plea bargains.
Kevin Lisle already has been convicted of murder and given a death sentence for shooting Kip Logan to death in a traffic altercation on the U.S. 95 Expressway. That conviction was based on two admitted accomplices who are scheduled to testify in the current trial.
Blaskey said that in exchange for their testimony against Lisle, those two, John Melcher, 18, and Adam Evans, 16, won treatment as juvenile offenders and were given probation. Originally they had been charged with murder as adults.
Herndon said Melcher and Evans will testify that they heard Lisle admit killing Lusch and Lopez tell how he watched the slaying in the rear-view mirror of his car.
Kevin Lisle
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