Testimony begins in triple-murder case
Former college football player Carleton Johnson showed no emotion but occasionally bit his lower lip when prosecutors displayed disturbing photos Friday of the bodies of his 5-year-old son and 6-year-old niece. He listened to witnesses describe how his brother gasped for air before he died from shotgun wounds on June 18, 2005.
Johnson, who was 35 at the time, stared straight forward during opening statements and testimony of the first witnesses in the triple-murder trial in which he is accused of slaying his son, Kamryn, his niece, Johnna, and his older brother, John Wellington Johnson.
Prosecutor Robert Daskas said Johnson used a pistol-grip, pump-action shotgun to slay his family members for no apparent reason that night at an apartment in southwest Las Vegas where he stayed with his brother, his brother’s girlfriend, Kimberly Kuivinem, and the children.
“For a while, John Johnson survived,” Daskas said, describing how he had been shot at close range.
“The kids didn’t stand a chance,” he said about the alleged shotgun attack by Carleton Johnson, a defensive back for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas from 1989 to 1991 who later was a volunteer football coach and substitute teacher at Cheyenne High School.
“At the conclusion of this case, we will not be able to tell you why this happened,” Daskas told the jury in District Judge Lee Gates’ courtroom.
Daskas played a 911 tape of Kuivinem after she discovered the bodies upon returning from work that evening, a few minutes after she had talked on a cell phone to her boyfriend, John Johnson, her daughter’s father.
“Oh God! Oh God! … My kids,” she screamed on the 911 tape.
Later in Friday’s trial, Kuivinem explained that she felt Carleton Johnson’s son was part of her family. “I treated Kamryn just like my own.”
Tears trickled down her face as she talked about finding the children.
“I went and checked on Johnna, and she wasn’t breathing, and she was lying in a pool of blood. Kamryn, he was lying on the bed up in the top right corner face down,” she said, sobbing. “I just watched the man walk out of my house to watch me walk in and see that.”
She said she saw a 12-gauge shotgun on the floor in front of a chair in the living room and smelled an unusual “smoke smell” as she was walking out, one that prosecutors believe was caused by gunpowder that had exploded in two types of shotgun shells found at the scene.
Kuivinem and her neighbor at the time, Robert Brewer, described how they saw Carleton Johnson on the sidewalk outside the apartment in the Ritz complex on Jones Boulevard, near Tropicana Avenue.
Brewer said he had heard three sounds “like someone would take a flat paddle and slap it.”
“I came out the door and headed up the sidewalk. I seen Carleton Johnson pacing back and forth. His hands were on the back of his head,” Brewer said.
“I asked him a couple times about those sounds. … He wouldn’t say nothin’ to me. I asked him two or three times,” Brewer said, adding that he went back to his apartment.
“Five to 10 minutes later, I hear Kimmie screaming. She’s screaming, ‘Help John,'” he said. “He was gasping for air.”
About the same time, he said he saw Carleton Johnson driving west out of the parking lot in a green Ford Mustang. “He was taking off. He was getting out of there,” Brewer said.
According to police, Carleton Johnson drove to a car wash a short distance away, parked the Mustang and then walked to another apartment complex, where he committed an armed robbery with a double-barrel shotgun concealed in a white T-shirt.
A police officer who responded saw him and took him into custody but Johnson told police he had no knowledge of the shootings at the apartment.
Johnson has pleaded not guilty to three counts of premeditated murder.
Defense attorney Andrea Luem told the jury there is no motive and no proof that Johnson was involved in the shootings.
“The state wants you to believe that Carleton Johnson killed three people he loved for no reason,” Luem said. “Look at the facts and the evidence and hold the state to their burden. Carleton Johnson and his brother, John, were the best of friends. … Just because they can prove a robbery doesn’t mean they can prove a murder.”
