DATE: Saturday, May 31, 1997                TAG: 9705310264

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B3   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY JON FRANK, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH                    LENGTH:   73 lines

HAMBURGER HELPED PRY STORY FROM TEEN IN TROUBLE

After his arrest on Sept. 11 last year, 14-year-old Zackary Anthony Carter was interviewed by a police detective for more than three hours about the shooting death of his 8-year-old half sister.

During most of the interview, Carter claimed he could remember nothing about how Cierra Rose Carter died late in the afternoon on Sept. 10 from a shotgun wound to her head.

But Detective Doug Zebley was persistent. Slowly, Zebley opened Carter's memory with repeated questions and softened his resolve with a fast-food hamburger.

Eventually, a gruesome picture emerged of how a deeply disturbed youth struck out violently when confronted with sibling rivalry, school suspension and other pressures that most adolescents struggle with but resolve with relative ease.

On Friday, jurors heard the videotaped confession given by the Princess Anne Middle School student eight months ago. The videotape was played during the second day of testimony in Carter's first-degree murder trial.

As he munched on a burger and french fries, Carter admitted to Zebley that 24 hours earlier he had killed his sister with a single shotgun blast while the two were home alone.

``I wish I hadn't, but I can't change what I have done,'' Carter calmly told Zebley in a Virginia Beach Police Department interview room.

``I had no motive,'' Carter said. ``I had no reason to do it. I just did it. I didn't think about it when I was doing it and afterwards it really messed me up.''

Carter told Zebley that before the shooting he was worried about how his father would react to trouble Carter had encountered earlier that day at school. The eighth-grader was caught with cigarettes that fell from his shirt pocket during physical education class. He faced a school suspension, Carter told Zebley, and was being chided by other students on the way home from school.

A half-hour after Carter got home, Cierra arrived with a handful of excellent assignments in her hand, he said.

``She started flipping through her papers and showing them to me,'' Carter told Zebley. ``She had all these terrifics and was proud of herself.''

Carter also told Zebley that he knew his half sister did not want him living with their father and her mother at their home in the Ocean Lakes subdivision. Carter had joined the family in May after living with his natural mother in Staunton, Va. He told Zebley he was afraid he'd have to go back.

Before the interview, Carter had been missing for about 24 hours before police found him wandering along a street about a block from his home late on the afternoon of Sept. 11.

Carter told police he spent the night of the 10th and the day of the 11th in a treehouse behind the subdivision where he lived.

Initially Carter told Zebley that he could not remember how he got to the treehouse, only that he awakened there after running away from home.

As Carter's story unfolded, he told Zebley that he grabbed a shotgun from his father's closet before his sister arrived home and fired it once in his bed.

Once Cierra arrived home, he said, he invited his sister into his bedroom and positioned her in a beanbag chair at the base of his bed, where he was sitting.

As Cierra leaned her head against a pillow that was resting on Carter's knees, he placed the shotgun against the pillow. Then, he told the detective, he leaned back, closed his eyes and pulled the trigger.

``I just know I wasn't thinking right,'' Carter told Zebley. ``I was confused and I really have no clue. I just did it and after it got done I didn't know why I did it.''

Carter's trial is scheduled to continue Monday. ILLUSTRATION: Photo

Zackary Anthony Carter's

videotaped confession was heard Friday by jurors in his murder

trial's second day. KEYWORDS: MURDER JUVENILE SHOOTING TRIAL

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