Thursday, Sept. 9, 1999 | 10:40 a.m.
With one last witness today, the prosecution was to rest its case in the trial of Terrell Cochise Young on charges he was a key player in the execution-style murders of four young men.
The four were targeted in the deadly robbery on the mistaken belief that they had large quantities of cash and drugs in their home off Nellis Boulevard and Tropicana Avenue. In reality, there were only a couple of hundred dollars and a few pills, but the deadly course of events already had begun.
The prosecution's only remaining witness was Dr. James Bucklin, a county deputy medical examiner, who was scheduled to show the jury the haunting photographs of the victims' bodies as they lay in pools of blood with their hands duct-taped behind their backs.
The young men's empty wallets lay nearby.
Defense attorneys said that Young, 20, will take the witness stand in his own defense. The jury already has heard his words in a taped confession he gave to Metro Police homicide detectives.
In that statement Young named Donte Johnson, 19, as the actual killer who stood over each victim -- Jeffrey Biddle, 19, Tracey Gorringe, 20, Matthew Mowen, 19, and Peter Talamantez, 17 -- and fired single shots into their heads.
Young expressed remorse for the incident and told police he never intended for anyone to die.
But three days after the Aug. 14, 1998, murder spree, Young and Johnson were back in trouble with the law, and again it involved guns.
Nevada Highway Patrol Trooper Robert Honea testified Wednesday that he stopped a stolen car driven by Johnson as it raced at 85 mph along U.S. 95 near East Charleston Boulevard.
Young was the passenger, but Honea said that before he could take the pair into custody the men fled on foot and efforts to find them failed.
Inside the car Honea found a sawed-off rifle believed to have been carried to the quadruple murder -- but not used -- by Young.
What the jury didn't hear was Honea's story that when Young exited the car, he had a .38-caliber pistol in his hand but chose to drop it and flee rather than engage in a shootout with the trooper. District Judge Joseph Pavlikowski had ruled that evidence of the pistol was not admissible in the trial because it played no role in the multiple murders.
Honea testified that he didn't know the identities of the two men he had stopped, but when Johnson's photo appeared in the Las Vegas Sun after his arrest a few days later on murder charges, the trooper recognized him as the driver of the car.
When Young's picture was broadcast on a television news show after his arrest a couple of weeks later, Honea said, he was positive that was the passenger in the stolen vehicle.
If Young is convicted of first-degree murder for his role, the same jury will have to decide if the appropriate punishment is the death sentence or life in prison with or without the possibility of parole.
A third defendant in the case, 19-year-old Sikia Smith, already has been convicted of murder for his part in the deadly spree.
Smith had confessed that he ransacked the home in search of valuables but did not carry a gun nor participate in the duct-taping of the victims. He was sentenced to life with no chance of parole.
Johnson is scheduled to stand trial Jan. 10.
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