Witness Testifies She Saw Calif. Paramedic Fatally Shot
Aug. 11--OAKLAND -- The trial for two teens charged with the murder of paramedic Quinn Boyer continued Tuesday with testimony from a woman who watched Boyer get shot during an attempted carjacking in the Oakland Hills in 2013.
"In my 76 years of living, I've never seen anyone shoot a gun before so I was sitting there stunned," said the Oakland woman who asked not to be identified in print. "It's the most traumatic event I've ever witnessed in my life."
The eyewitness said she was driving down Keller Avenue on her way to pick up pizza for some tree-trimmers working on her property when she stopped at the sight of a man in the roadway.
Suddenly, he shot at another car. The victim gunned his car at him and then drove off the road down a ravine, she said. Boyer, a 34-year-old newlywed who worked as a paramedic in Santa Clara County, was shot in the head after taking his father to a doctor's appointment. He was pronounced brain-dead and taken off life support two days later, April 4, 2013.
Christian Burton, 18, and David McNeal, 17, could face life in prison without the possibility of parole if convicted as charged with special circumstances murder.
Burton, the alleged shooter, was 16 at the time and McNeal, charged as an accomplice, was 15. Both are being prosecuted as an adults. Three of their friends have already been convicted of Boyer's murder in juvenile court. A fourth, 18-year-old Nazhee Flowers, is serving a 15-year sentence for a carjacking committed the day Boyer was shot. Burton's attorney Ernie Castillo says Flowers was the person who shot Boyer and that his client is innocent.
Castillo's questions to the eyewitness Tuesday focused on what the shooter was wearing. She didn't remember on the stand, but originally told the police that he was wearing a baseball cap and beige jacket.
Flowers was wearing a beige jacket and a white baseball hat on surveillance video of the teens before and after Boyer was shot around noon April 2, 2013, while Burton was wearing a black hoodie underneath a sleeveless jean jacket.
The eyewitness' account differs from the narrative that investigators pieced together based on the teens' confessions. She said Boyer had been driving slowly on Keller Avenue when the gunman jumped out of a tan car and approached him. Prosecutor Glenn Kim told jurors the teens pulled up to Boyer's vehicle while he was pulled over to the side of the road sending a text message.
The witness said she only saw one man come of the tan-brown car. Kim said that both Flowers and Burton did, though only Burton used a gun.
The witness said she was focused on the gunman, who ran to the side of the road to look at the car that had crashed down the ravine before looking at her.
She thinks that her own life was saved when one of the gunman's friends yelled, "Come on, let's get out of here," prompting the shooter to jump back into the tan car.
"I really suffered from post traumatic stress for about six months. I couldn't even drive on Keller for months after that," the woman said. As she exited the courtroom, she quietly shared her condolences to the victim's father, Roger Boyer.
Also testifying Tuesday were two retired Oakland men who had been carjacked by some of the teens that day. One man owned the tan Dodge Intrepid that the teens were using when Boyer was shot. They flashed the gun at him before stealing the car outside a market at High Street and Congress Avenue about an hour before Boyer was shot.
The other man was carjacked of his maroon Honda Civic by his house and an elementary school that afternoon on E. 24th Street at 10th Avenue in East Oakland. At least two of the teens used it in a high-speed chase with police.
The jury also heard from a now-16-year-old boy who had been leaving the Frick Middle School after-school car program on April 3, 2013 when he was robbed at gunpoint by two teens and shot in the buttocks, allegedly by McNeal. He suffers from lasting pain from the shooting; the bullet is still lodged inside him.
He said they had already stolen his Miami Heat hat when someone from a car shouted, "Shoot that (expletive)," and the gunman fired.
An ambulance met him at his aunt's house, where he slowly walked in pain by himself after two different people he asked for help refused him.
Contact Malaika Fraley at 925-234-1684. Follow her at Twitter.com/malaikafraley.
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