JURY HEARS EMOTIONAL TESTIMONY FROM FATHER OF MURDER VICTIM

ABINGDON -- Gaines Davis told a federal jury here Thursday he warned
his son to stop dealing drugs unless he wanted to die.

"I told him, 'You better get out of it because either the law will
end up shooting you or the ones you work for will end up shooting
you,'" he said, recalling a conversation he had 13 years ago.

It was just a few weeks later that Davis got a phone call telling him
his son, daughter-in-law and stepgrandson were dead.

Robert and Una Mae Davis, both 32, and 14-year-old Bobby Hopewell Jr.
were gunned down at their home in the small Tazewell County town of
Pocahontas.

"We were getting ready for church. I found out my son had been shot.
He was laid up in the road. The little boy was inside his room ...
covered with a field jacket. He had held his arm up to protect
himself," Davis said, the words coming so rapidly the judge twice had
to tell him to slow down.

Davis gave his emotional account of his son's death at the end of the
first day of testimony in the federal trial of one of the men accused
in the April 16, 1989, killings.

Samuel Stephen "Sam" Ealy, 39, is standing trial on a charge of
conspiring to commit murder to protect a continuing criminal
enterprise. He also is being tried on six murder counts -- two for
each of the three people slain.

Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Ealy and another man
charged in the killings, Walter L. "Pete" Church, 46. Church is
scheduled to be tried separately in September.

Ealy claims he is being framed by government witnesses who are trying
to get out of jail. The former Pocahontas man was tried on state
murder charges in Tazewell County in 1991 and was acquitted.

Much of the evidence introduced Thursday also was heard by the state
court jury, with one significant exception.

The federal jury heard about evidence linking Ealy's car, a
robin's-egg blue 1977 Ford LTD, to the crime scene.

All evidence about the car was suppressed in state court because the
judge there ruled it was discovered during an illegal search. U.S.
District Judge James Jones ruled the search was legal at a hearing
last year.

Light-blue paint was found on a retaining wall near the Davis
family's home on Merrick Lane, a narrow dead-end street, witnesses
testified. Part of a broken taillight also was found nearby, they
said.

Amy Lawrence, a trace-evidence analyst with the state crime
laboratory in Roanoke, told jurors she compared the broken part of
the light to the taillight assembly taken from Ealy's car. They
matched, she said.

She also compared paint from Ealy's car to the paint found on the
wall and determined they were same color and texture. Both samples
had body filler in them, she said.

"They could have originated from the same source," she said.

On cross-examination, Lawrence admitted nothing she found proved that
Ealy -- and not just his car -- was at the crime scene.

David Wayne Popp, who said he used to drink with Ealy at a local
saloon, also testified about Ealy's car.

Popp told jurors it nearly ran him off the road on the night of the
killings as he drove home from The Cricket, where he had been
drinking. But Popp admitted he did not see who was driving the car.

"I seen a headlight coming up behind us. Then, they run us over into
a ditch," he said.

But another witness, who was a town police officer on duty around the
time of the killings, told jurors he never saw Ealy's car that night.

William Tabor told jurors he was watching traffic in the town's
business district from 1:30-3 a.m. and likely would have seen Ealy's
car had he driven from his home to the Davis home.

But he also admitted he was reading a crime novel at the time and had
conversations with several people that could have distracted him.

Tabor testified he did see Church -- who is accused of carrying out
the killing with Ealy -- at around midnight. Church had another man
in his truck, but the man did not look like Ealy, Tabor said.

"I'm not saying I would have seen every car that came by," Tabor testified.

Much of the rest of Thursday's testimony dealt with evidence
collected at the Davis home. Jurors watched a videotape of the home
and saw photographs of the three family members, all of whom were
killed with a shotgun.

Robert Davis was shot in the chest and head on the road near his
home, prosecutors have said, adding that they believe the shots came
from someone in a car.

Una Davis was shot across the chest as she ran toward a neighbor's
home, then was shot at point-blank range in the head after she fell
in the yard, prosecutors said. Her son was shot twice as he huddled
in a fetal position in his closet, prosecutors said.

The prosecution contends Ealy and Church were ordered to kill Robert
Davis to protect a former county official's drug-dealing business and
that the other two were killed to keep them from testifying about the
shooting.

Testimony is to continue at 9 a.m. today.

Ealy was being held in federal custody pending the outcome of the trial.