By Richard K. De Atley
The Press-Enterprise
RIVERSIDE, Calif. — An attorney representing the man charged with beating and shooting a Riverside police officer told jurors Monday that “Earl Ellis Green murdered Officer Ryan Bonaminio.”
The courtroom, which was packed with Bonaminio’s family and friends, remained quiet when Gail O’Rane, a deputy capital defender representing Green, made the surprising admission during opening statements.
She acknowledged that Green has pleaded not guilty, but explained that the admission now focuses the trial on the punishment, rather than on whether her client was guilty or innocent. She said she hoped to spare her client from the death penalty.
Green faces death if convicted of first-degree murder as charged. O’Rane said she will ask jurors to consider second-degree murder, which does not carry the death penalty, but can bring life without possibility of parole if the victim was a police officer.
Green, 46, a parolee with a history of violent crimes, is accused of slaying Bonaminio about 10 p.m. Nov. 7, 2010, after the officer slipped and fell while chasing Green on foot.
O’Rane said Green had been cut off by his family the day before the slaying, and his state of mind reduced his culpability.
But Deputy District Attorney Michael Hestrin called the slaying “a case of cruelty and brutality” by a man who turned an injured officer’s own gun on him, rather than make an easy escape.
Hestrin described how the officer chased Green along the eastern edge of Riverside’s Fairmount Park and then into the parking lot of an adjacent church, the Center for Spiritual Living. Bonaminio rounded a corner of the building and slipped and fell on a muddy patch in a flower planter.
Hestrin said Green doubled back and began beating Bonaminio with a metal pipe. The prosecutor then donned a latex glove and showed the jurors the pipe - a dumbbell bar, with circular hand guards on either side of a cross-hatched grip area in the center.
“Officer Bonaminio was on his hands and knees. Defendant Green came out and began striking the officer on the head with this pipe. He hit him numerous times on the top and the back of the head,” Hestrin said. “Over and over.” Hestrin set the bar down on a table top with a loud clunk.
Hestrin said Green then took Bonaminio’s handgun and pointed it at the officer. Bonaminio managed to get back on his feet and put his hands, palms out, toward Green.
“Officer Bonaminio said, ‘Don’t do it.’ He didn’t beg, he just said, ‘Don’t do it,’” Hestrin said.
Hestrin said Green cocked the gun and then moved toward Bonaminio, firing three shots. Two shots missed, but the third, fired from 12 to 24 inches away, struck the officer’s head.
The prosecutor showed the courtroom a projected picture of where the officer fell a long wash of blood that had streamed down the center of a marked parking space, just below a concrete parking stop block in the church’s lot.
Bonaminio’s wounded head was resting on the stop block, “almost like a pillow,” testified Riverside Police Sgt. Carla Hardin, one of the first officers at the scene.
“Officer Bonaminio’s blood, and his life, poured out of him,” Hestrin said in his opening statement. “He died there, on the cold and dirty asphalt, in the parking lot of the Center for Spiritual Living.”
In her opening statements, O’Rane said, “I wish I could tell you what Mr. Hestrin said was not true. But I can’t. Much of what Mr. Hestrin said will not be disputed.”
The defense attorney said she will ask the jury of eight men and four women to return a verdict of second-degree murder.
She said Green and his uncle argued the day before the slaying and Green was ordered to move his trailer off the family property in Rubidoux. He also was told he could not longer work at the family-owned auto repair shop.
“So this led Mr. Green to go and steal that Penske truck,” O’Rane said. As a result of the hit-and-run, Bonaminio became involved, she said.
The details of what happened after the foot chase that ended in the church parking lot will be key to the determination of whether Bonaminio’s slaying was first- or second-degree murder, O’Rane said.
“What you are going to be asked to decide is what his mental state was,” O’Rane said.
Bonaminio had been responding to a call about a minor hit-and-run between a tractor-trailer rig and a car near Highway 60 just north of Fairmount Park.
The rig had been stolen a short time before, from a Penske rental lot nearby.
The woman whose car was struck by the tractor-trailer rig followed it and called 911.
Bonaminio was patrolling Market Street along the eastern edge of the park when he spotted the truck heading the opposite direction. The dashboard camera on Bonaminio’s patrol car shows the officer made a U-turn and pulled up behind the truck.
The driver fled. The video shows him reaching under his jacket and pulling out a metal pipe.
Less than two minutes later, Green is seen returning to the truck and driving off.
Stephen McQueen, a witness to the murder, gave a tense account of Bonaminio’s last moments.
He said he was in the parking lot of the church because his fiancée, Susan Amaya, needed to use the bathroom. The two were church volunteers and had keys to the restrooms.
McQueen said he was standing by Amaya’s car, waiting for her when he heard someone shouting “Stop! Stop!” as Green, then Bonaminio ran past.
McQueen heard the officer shout, “Show me your hands, show me your hands!” as the two men ran across the parking lot. He then heard Bonaminio twice repeat, “Don’t do it.”
He demonstrated for the courtroom what he saw:
Bonaminio placing his hand on his holstered gun as he chased Green across the parking lot moments before the shooting; Bonaminio’s hands up as he faced Green in his final moments; and Green’s double-handed grip on the officer’s gun as he fired.
Monday’s opening statement was the first time the prosecutor said directly that Bonaminio was slain with his own police-issued handgun, a Glock .40-caliber semi-automatic. It later was recovered from a linen closet at Green’s girlfriend’s home.
Green was arrested in the parking lot of a Target store on Arlington Avenue in Riverside two days after the slaying.
Copyright 2012 The Press Enterprise, Inc.