15-Year-Old Found Guilty of Murder in Drug Dispute

A baby-faced, 15-year-old Thousand Oaks youth was convicted of first-degree murder Wednesday in the stabbing death of a man who was described in court testimony as a neighborhood drug dealer.

Charles Kenneth Craig, who had testified the killing was in self-defense, winced slightly and grimaced when Judge Lawrence Storch announced the verdict in Ventura Juvenile Court.

Storch, who decided the case without a jury, said he will sentence Craig on June 12.

Craig, who said he rode his bicycle to and from the Feb. 4 slaying, could be turned over to the California Youth Authority, which could keep him in custody until he is 25. There is no minimum sentence.

Argument Recalled

The 5-foot-6, 220-pound youth testified that he stabbed 21-year-old Jeffery Anderson in the back because they had an argument over a drug deal and he thought Anderson was preparing to hit him with a two-foot metal pipe.

Craig admitted that he stole marijuana from the dying man as he fled the Anderson house in Thousand Oaks.

Storch said that, rather than being a case of self-defense, the slaying “occurred during the commission of a robbery of Jeff Anderson.”

After the verdict, Deputy Public Defender Roland Short, who represented Craig, said he expected the teen-ager to be sent to the youth authority.

“It’s legally possible the judge will set him free or give him a light sentence, but I’m not expecting it,” Short said. “It’s going to be difficult to persuade the judge not to send him to the youth authority, because the kid has had some problems in the past.”

Police said that, in the 12 months before the slaying, Craig had spent 120 days in youth facilities. He had been charged with purse snatching, burglary and disturbing the peace stemming from three separate incidents. In one case, police said, Craig and his friends harassed a woman shopper outside a local market until she fled screaming from her car.

Deathbed Accusation

The three-day trial was highlighted by the playing of a dramatic tape recording of a deathbed interview with Anderson, who died of a single stab wound in the back from a kitchen knife with a seven-inch blade.

Moments before he died at Los Robles Medical Center in Thousand Oaks, Anderson twice shouted, “Charley Craig,” after a detective asked who had stabbed him.

In rebutting the argument that the killing was self-defense, Deputy Ventura County Dist. Atty. James S. Irving cited a segment of the taped interview in which Anderson was asked several times why Craig had stabbed him.

In an exasperated voice, the dying man shouted, “I don’t know! I don’t know!”

Irving also cited testimony from a friend of Craig that the defendant had boasted several days before the stabbing that he would rob and kill Anderson.

Short had argued that such statements were “braggadocio” from a youth “trying to build himself up.”

Issue of Intent

But Irving said Craig intended to “rip off Jeffery Anderson from his pot and stab Jeffery Anderson. And that’s exactly what he did.”

The Anderson family home, in which the victim lived, was a “known source of marijuana” for neighborhood youths, police said. Craig testified he bought marijuana from Anderson 15 times in the year before the slaying.

At the time of his death, Anderson was unemployed, on probation for selling marijuana and had $1,700 in cash in his pockets, police said.

Craig first told authorities that he saw another man running from Anderson’s bedroom and found the victim already dying from a stab wound.

But he changed his story to self-defense, apparently when he learned about Anderson’s tape-recorded accusation, police said.

“When one story didn’t work, he tried another,” Irving said. “So much for credibility.”

Although Storch rejected Irving’s contention that evidence indicated the murder was premeditated, the prosecutor said he was satisfied with the verdict because a “a first-degree murder conviction in the commission of a felony is exactly the same in juvenile court as a first-degree murder conviction based on premeditation.”