olds
Elite Member
killed over hookers and blow
Murder trial focuses on night of debauchery
The imperfections of a slain man were put on public display Monday in a trial about a night of debauchery and the bloody death that followed with the dawn.
Two pals in Woodland boozed heavy at the local bars and perked themselves up with dollar-billed sniffs of cocaine, the prosecutor said. Then they hit a strip club in Sacramento, for lap dances and a private visit to the "VIP" room, according to the prosecutor's opening statement.
Unsated, they pushed further into the night in search of prostitutes and more blow, the prosecutor said.
Just before 5 a.m. on March 24, 2007, Jesse Reiter and Michael Boyd wound up on a side street in south Sacramento. They sat there in Boyd's red Jeep Cherokee and waited for their vice connection. Instead, they found themselves set up for what authorities described as a carjacking robbery.
Reiter resisted, and he took a shotgun blast to his right femoral artery because of it, the prosecutor said. He bled out on the 8300 block of Valley Lark Drive before he was transported to UC Davis Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead at 5:59 a.m.
"He died on the worst night of his life," the victim's brother, Jon Reiter, said in an interview after court Monday. "It's sad that he died on that day where everybody has to see it."
The youngest of 10 children, Reiter, 36, a former probation officer, worked as the circulation manager for the Davis Enterprise newspaper at the time of his death. He was married and had a daughter who is now 5.
According to a prosecutor's motion filed in the case, his wife and his little girl were very much on his mind in his final hour.
"Tell my wife and (daughter) that I love them," were among his last words, the motion said.
Defendants Rashad Delrico Mack, 22, and Ulysses Peter Walker, 21, listened from the defense table Monday while Deputy District Attorney Dawn Bladet outlined the cases against them in separate opening statements to the two separate Sacramento Superior Court juries.
Both are charged with a special-circumstance robbery-murder that would mean life in prison with no parole if they are convicted.
Mack's lawyer, Pete Harned, denied in his opening statement that his client had anything to do with the shooting, or the robbery. Prosecutors, however, identified Mack as the gunman who blasted Reiter in the leg with a .410 shotgun. According to testimony, Mack shot Reiter because the victim made fun of his gun.
"The dude was playing with me, so I shot him in his artery," Mack said, according to witness testimony Bladet related to the Mack jury.
Co-defendant Walker's lawyer also put the responsibility for the shooting on Mack.
"Mr. Mack, acting solely on his own, decided he was going to rob Mr. Reiter, and Mr. Mack, acting solely on his own, decided that when Mr. Reiter resisted, he was going to shoot Mr. Reiter, and as a result of that, Mr. Reiter died," Walker's attorney, Assistant Public Defender Michael R. Nelson, told his client's jury.
Nelson said that Walker knew nothing about a planned robbery and that his client was at the scene only because he had helped arrange a drug deal.
Reiter's last night began at Tony's Cocktails in Woodland, before and he Boyd stopped in at a couple of other local establishments. At 2 a.m. closing time, they hopped into Boyd's car and drove down the freeway to the Club Fantasy on Richards Boulevard, just north of downtown Sacramento.
It was there that after an hour or so of private entertainment they asked around outside if anybody knew where they could find some hookers and dope. And it was there on Richards Boulevard, sometime after 4 a.m., that they met up with Walker, who told them to follow him to Valley Hi, on the city's far south side.
Walker led Reiter and Boyd to Valley Lark Drive and told them to wait, Bladet said. Then he hustled around the corner to Mack's house and picked up his partner to bring him back to where Reiter and Boyd were parked, across from John Reith Elementary School.
Reiter got out of the car to meet the two men who approached them, Bladet said. While he got into it with Mack, Walker went up to Boyd and demanded the keys to the Jeep, according to the prosecutor.
Then came the shotgun blast.
Police later found rolled-up dollar bills outside the Jeep, as well as a condom. They also found a container with 2.96 grams of cocaine in a front yard next to the car ? Reiter's stash, according to Bladet. An autopsy showed Reiter had "high levels" of cocaine in his blood, the prosecutor said.
Jon Reiter described his brother's outcome as "bizarre." He said Jesse was "the cleanest-cut of all of us," the baby of the family who lectured his older siblings.
"It's just so ironic," Jon Reiter said. "He was a good man."
