DATE: Friday, May 30, 1997                  TAG: 9705300686

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY JON FRANK, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH                    LENGTH:  103 lines

SKETCH SHOWS TEEN MEANT TO KILL HIS SISTER, STATE SAYS DRAWING DEPICTS FAMILY, WITH KNIFE LOOMING OVER GIRL

Several days before Zackary Anthony Carter allegedly killed his half sister with a shotgun blast to the head, the 14-year-old eighth-grader drew a picture of his family for a school art class.

The picture shows Carter, who went by his middle name, with his parents and Cierra, his 8-year-old half sister. A knife is pointed at Cierra's head.

On Thursday, during the first day of testimony in Carter's first-degree murder trial, defense attorneys argued that the drawing should be ruled inadmissible as evidence, maintaining that it is irrelevant.

But prosecutors believe it undercuts the defense argument that Carter shot his sister accidentally while the two sat in his bedroom on Sept. 10 at their home in the Ocean Lakes subdivision.

It could be a crucial piece of evidence when the eight-woman, five-man jury decides Carter's fate. He is the first juvenile to be tried for murder in Virginia Beach under a new state juvenile crime statute that automatically treats all juvenile violent offenders as adults.

Circuit Judge Frederick B. Lowe said Thursday he will rule on the drawing when prosecutors call as a witness the Princess Anne Middle School teacher who discovered the picture several days after Carter was arrested for his sister's murder.

The school drawing is only a small part of the prosecution's case against Carter, who is now 15. Defense attorneys also will have to overcome a statement that Carter gave to police on Sept. 11, the day of his arrest.

According to a videotape made by police and played during a pre-trial hearing, Carter said the shooting was not accidental and that he knew what he was doing when he placed his father's 20-gauge shotgun against a pillow and shot Cierra Carter in the head.

During other parts of the three-hour statement, however, he seems to indicate the shooting was accidental and that he didn't know what he was doing when he shot his sister. That is the part of the statement upon which defense attorneys Tom Watkins and Melinda Glaubke are basing their case.

``This case is not about murder,'' Glaubke said in her opening statement on Thursday. ``It's about a horrible accident that happened on Sept. 10, 1996, when Anthony was playing around with a loaded shotgun.''

Prosecutor Bob Dautrich, though, said Carter hunted out his father's shotgun, then found ammunition before test-firing the shotgun into the bed of his room. When his half sister got home from school, Dautrich said, Carter reloaded the shotgun, invited his sister into his room and shot her in the head.

On Thursday, jurors were taken on a grim video tour of the Carter home, as prosecutors showed videotape made by police on the day of the murder.

Cierra's body was found in a semi-fetal position in the bathtub of an upstairs bathroom.

The inside of Anthony Carter's bedroom, where the shooting occurred, was splattered with blood. Blood-soaked towels and spent shotgun shells littered the floor.

Also found on the bedroom floor were Cierra's polka-dot shorts and panties.

Traci Carter, Anthony Carter's stepmother, testified Thursday that he had come to live with her and his father in May. Before that he lived in Staunton, Va., with his mother, she testified.

On the day of the shooting, the boy had been in trouble at school, Traci Carter said. He had been caught with cigarettes, something that his parents had warned him about in the past.

``I think that he was concerned that his father would be angry with him,'' Traci Carter testified.

Usually, Traci Carter said, her husband got home from work at about the same time that the children left school, but on Sept. 10, he had to work late.

By the time she got home, at about 5:30 p.m., Anthony and Cierra Carter had been home alone for about 2 1/2 hours.

When Traci Carter could not find Cierra, she testified that she asked Anthony Carter to help find her.

Her stepson, she said, went to a neighbor's house to inquire about the girl and then suggested that his stepmother take her car and search for Cierra.

When Traci Carter went upstairs to look for her daughter, she found the doors were locked to the bathroom, the boy's bedroom and Cierra's bedroom.

After sending him for a screwdriver so that she could open the doors, she waited for him to return. When he did not, she got a screwdriver and opened his bedroom door.

``I had a feeling there was something really wrong,'' Traci Carter said. ``The first thing that I saw was a gun laying on his bed and some blood and some other parts.''

She ran downstairs and called a neighbor, who came to the house and found Cierra's body.

Zachery Charles Carter, the boy's father, testified that his son was familiar with many types of firearms from years of hunting with other family members. He said that his son had possibly even fired the gun used to kill his sister on a family outing a year before the shooting.

Zachery Carter said he made every effort to keep his three guns away from his children. He said he kept a revolver at the Navy armory, and a rifle in the trunk of his wife's car.

The shotgun used in the shooting was hidden in the back of a bedroom closet. The ammunition, he said, was in a vinyl bag that was hidden in a pair of overalls.

To get either would have taken some effort, he said.

``You would have had to move things and dig for it,'' Zachery Carter testified. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

HUY NGUYEN/The Virginian-Pilot

Zackary Anthony Carter, 15, was in court Thursday for the first day

of his murder trial. Cierra Carter was 8 when she died; he was 14. KEYWORDS: MURDER SHOOTING TRIAL

JUVENILE

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