Victims’ families share the pain

Greg Tuttle and Kim Smith

Friday, June 16, 2000 | 10:57 a.m.

David Mowen hasn't missed a minute of court hearings in the 22 months since his son was found murdered along with three other young men inside a Las Vegas home.

While attending three separate murder trials, Mowen has watched attorneys argue fine points of law while judges have made critical rulings on evidence. He has sat patiently in a Clark County District Courtroom for hour upon hour as prosecutors displayed gruesome crime scene pictures, experts described the science of DNA and defense attorneys attacked the credibility of witnesses.

"As a parent, you always tell your children you'll be there for them," Mowen said Thursday while standing outside the courthouse. "I wasn't there for him the night he was killed, so I'm here for him now."

For Mowen and other relatives of the four victims, the experience has led to very personal opinions about the criminal justice system.

It also has shown them the power such tragedies have to both rip families apart and create lasting bonds among the survivors.

Matthew Mowen, 19, Peter Talamantez, 17, Tracey Gorringe, 20, and Jeffrey Biddle, 19, were killed Aug. 14, 1998, inside a home on Terra Linda Avenue.

Donte Johnson, 23, was convicted last week of first-degree murder and various other crimes associated with the young men's deaths. A jury weighing whether Johnson should live or die was temporarily halted in its deliberations this morning.

The delay was called to enable attorneys and the judge to decide what to do about an apparent deadlock.

According to prosecutors, Johnson, Sikia Smith and Terrell Young went to the home with the intention of stealing $10,000 and drugs. They left with $240, a pager, Sony Play Station and a VCR after Johnson pumped one bullet each into the backs of the young men's heads.

Smith and Young are serving life sentences with no chance of parole after being convicted by separate juries last year.

Defense attorneys, Dayvid Figler and Joe Sciscento, pleaded for their client's life, hinting that Johnson may not have been the triggerman and even if he was, his life was marred by poverty and abuse as a child.

As members of the victims' family waited for word of Johnson's fate, they described their myriad of emotions and impressions over the last two years.

All said they were impressed and pleased with how prosecutors Gary Guymon and Robert Daskas handled the case from the very beginning.

Some, however, felt the defense attorneys went too far in attacking the victims' lifestyle in an effort to gain sympathy for their clients.

They also agreed the scales of justice seemed to tilt more toward the defendants' rights than those of the victims' and the family members left behind.

"We do not have rights when we are here," Cindy Mowen, Matthew Mowen's mother said. "We're to sit like church mice. Yet the accused's family can get up and beg for his life."

Nick Gorringe, Tracey Gorringe's brother, said he was particularly angry when Johnson was allowed to speak to jurors without having to be sworn in or cross-examined by prosecutors.

"He got to take the stand and beg for his life. What about those four boys?" Gorringe said. "They didn't get to beg for their lives. Was that fair?"

Juanita Talamantez, Peter Talamantez's mother, said the fact her son was armed and all four boys were recreational drug users was irrelevant to the guilt or innocence of the three defendants.

She also said that Johnson's traumatic childhood on the streets of south-central Los Angeles doesn't justify the cold-blooded killings.

"That's got no bearing on this at all," Talamantez said. "I myself lived one block from the projects when growing up but I didn't become a murderer. I raised my sons in a gang-infested area and they didn't become murderers."

Talamantez also would have preferred swifter justice. All three trials should have been held back-to-back, she said. Each time a new trial was scheduled, it reopened wounds.

Those wounds are still too fresh for Marie Biddle, Jeffrey Biddle's mother. She declined to comment Thursday, saying she wasn't up to it.

David Mowen is angry at a California judicial system he said failed Johnson at an early age. Johnson served two years of a four-year sentence for robbing a Los Angeles bank, then disappeared while on parole in 1995.

"How does someone who robs a bank at 16 walk the streets two years later?" David Mowen asked. "Had our judicial system followed through, we wouldn't be in this situation."

As tragic and horrific as their loss is, the fact they have each other to lean on has been an unexpected life ring tossed into their sea of grief.

Many of the family members met within days of the slayings at a gathering at David and Cindy Mowen's Las Vegas home. Since then, they have grown closer and supported each other.

"We're always going to have this special bond between us," said Cindy Mowen. "We consider each other family."