PROSECUTOR: INFORMANT ROLE LED TO SLAYING
Police Had Said Chad Macdonald Wasn't Working For Them Anymore
At The Time Of His Death.

Yorba Linda teen-ager Chad MacDonald was strangled and beaten to death
because he was a police informant, a prosecutor told jurors Monday as
trial opened for the three suspects in the youth's killing.

"The defendants believe he's an informant and they don't want him to
tell, so they kill him," Deputy District Attorney Jeff Ramseyer told a
Los Angeles County Superior Court jury in Norwalk.

Ramseyer's comments marked the first time a law enforcement official
has said Chad MacDonald's role as a police informant led to the March
1998 killing.

Cindy MacDonald sued Brea police last year, contending that the
department pressured her son, then 17, to work as a drug informant and
placed him in danger that led to his death. Police acknowledge that
the youth made a single undercover drug purchase for them, but insist
he was long out of the program by the time he went to the Norwalk
house where he was slain.

The case sparked debate about police use of juveniles as informers and
led to a state law that now requires judges to approve the use of
teenagers as police operatives.

The trial of Jose A. Ibarra, 21, Michael L. Martinez, 22, and Florence
Norega, 30, opened 19 months after MacDonald's body was found in a
south Los Angeles alley. The three are charged with MacDonald's
murder, the rape and attempted murder of his girlfriend, kidnapping
and robbery. They could face the death penalty.

Defense lawyers told the jury Monday that their clients merely
intended to beat up MacDonald to scare him because they had heard he
was a police informant.

Ibarra's lawyer, Forrest Latiner, told the jury that a key issue will
be MacDonald's drug dealing and how it led him to that Norwalk house.

"That area, you don't go there," Latiner said. "Chad went there. He
took his teenage girlfriend there. ... Then a problem occurred. They
heard he was a snitch. What do you do about it? You teach someone a
lesson."

Latiner and the two other lawyers argued that MacDonald died during
that "lesson," not during a robbery or kidnapping, the special
circumstances Ramseyer needs to prove to secure a possible death sentence.

The only witness called to testify Monday was MacDonald's girlfriend,
who for the first time publicly described the day her boyfriend was
killed and how she was raped, choked with a rope, shot in the face and
abandoned in the Angeles National Forest.

The girlfriend said she was forced to listen from an adjacent room
while Ibarra and Noriega strangled MacDonald. Martinez put his hands -
and a gun - over ears so she would not have to hear MacDonald dying,
she said.

"I said, 'Will you please cover my ears! That's my boyfriend in
there,'" said the young woman, now 18. The Orange County Register is
not identifying her because she is a sex-crime victim.

She began sobbing as she described her boyfriend's death, prompting
Superior Court Judge Dewey L. Falcone to take a recess. Cindy
MacDonald wept in the front row of the courtroom while listening to
details about the slaying.

The young woman said she went to the Norwalk house to visit MacDonald
after he ran away from home, and agreed to stay with him. MacDonald,
she said, frequented the house to buy drugs in the months before his
death.

She told the jury that she and MacDonald smoked methamphetamine with
Ibarra, Noriega and Martinez on March 2, 1998. Noriega, she said,
argued with MacDonald about the quality of the methamphetamine, then
forced both youths to remove their clothing so she could search them
for hidden recording wires.

During her testimony, the girlfriend referred to Martinez as "Speedy"
and Noriega as "Flo," the street names she said she knew them by. She
said the three stole her necklace and ankle bracelet and MacDonald's
watch, emptied their pockets and backpacks, and demanded that they
come up with $225 or die.

Martinez and Noriega drove MacDonald to a bank, but he was unable to
withdraw money with his bank card, the girlfriend testified. While
they were gone, she said, Ibarra forced her to perform oral sex.

When MacDonald returned without the money, she said, the three began
beating them both in the head with a rifle. Noriega gagged MacDonald
with a sock shortly before the girlfriend said she heard choking sounds.