Larry King's Killer: "I wanted to kill him"

I haven't said much of late on the ongoing trial of Larry King's murder, Brandon McInerney. But a new Los Angeles Times article on the trial was too much to pass by. One of the elements of first degree murder is premeditation - i.e., that the murder was thought out and planned and not something that happened in the heat of the moment with no forethought. As is typical of criminal defense counsel, efforts are being made to paint McInerney as a victim of his circumstances including his f*cked up home setting. I'm sorry, but many, many people have risen above adverse home situations and certainly understood that killing someone was not acceptable. I don't buy the defense counsel's ploy and hopefully the effort will fail. Here are some highlights from the LA Times story:

The night before he killed Larry King, 14-year-old Brandon McInerney could think of nothing else. It wasn’t enough that King, a troubled eighth-grader, had started coming to school in high heels and makeup. But just that day he passed McInerney in the hallway and, in front of the lanky teen’s friends, uttered what McInerney saw as a repulsive come-on: “What’s up, baby?” It was the last straw.

For McInerney, there had been months of pressure to do better in school from his abusive, methamphetamine-addicted father. And now, there was this strange remark from this strange boy -- a comment that McInerney later described as “superdisgusting.” “I sat and I thought about it over and over,” he told psychologist Douglas Hoagland months after he shot King in a computer lab at E.O. Green Junior High in Oxnard. “It didn’t calm me down. It made me more angry. All I could think about was I wanted to kill him.”

McInerney’s internal monologue came out Monday in a Chatsworth courtroom as a prosecutor tried to shake the testimony of Hoagland, an expert for the defense in McInerney’s murder trial.

They [defense counsel] have argued that McInerney was a bright kid driven over the brink by a long history of violence at home and, in the end, teasing from the victim, whose cross-dressing he saw as in-your-face provocation.

On Feb. 12, 2008, after a night fuming over the perceived insult from King, McInerney left for school in a hurry — but came back to get his father’s loaded .22-caliber revolver, Hoagland testified.

He concealed it in a towel and stuffed it in his backpack. At school he stealthily withdrew the towel-wrapped gun and stuffed it into his pants. He told Hoagland he had started to have second thoughts about killing King, who sat immediately in front of him. But when he heard King telling a girl that he’d changed his name to Leticia, that changed.

Fox [the prosecutor] scoffed at the explanation, describing it as McInerney entering “a state of semi-unawareness.” She pointed to testimony from fellow students that McInerney had told them of his intent to kill King. When one of them asked McInerney whether he’d brought a gun to school, as he said he would, he lied and said he hadn’t. Not long afterward he fired the fatal shots.