Erik Menendez Tells of Keeping a Vigil Over Parents’ Bodies : Trial: Defendant says he sat in den and wondered if his mother and father had realized who had killed them.

The night he and his brother killed their parents, Erik Menendez testified Tuesday, he sat alone with the bloodied bodies and wondered if Jose and Kitty Menendez had known their sons were behind the lethal barrage.

The shootings, Menendez told the jury at his murder retrial, “were just a rush,” setting his mind racing and his heart pumping. “I remember the red of the firing, I remember my father saying, ‘No!’ and I just fired and fired and fired.”

He recalled that he fired first, and that his brother, Lyle, continued firing after he had emptied his shotgun. Lyle, he said, fired the shot to the back of their father’s head. And Lyle, he said, reloaded and fired the final shot into their mother’s face.

Menendez testified that when the shooting stopped, he and his brother sat in the foyer of their Beverly Hills mansion and waited for police to come. Minutes passed, and when they heard no sirens, the brothers decided to try an establish an alibi.

An hour or so after the shootings, Erik Menendez said, he began his lonely vigil. Lyle, he said, called police and went upstairs. “I didn’t want to be with them, but I couldn’t leave them,” Menendez said.

“I remember staring at my father in particular and just being in shock that my dad could die, and he was sitting in front of me, dead. I remember thinking how wrong this looked.”

As for his mother, Menendez said: “I just wondered if she knew it was me, if she was scared. Did she understand? Was she hurting. . . ? I just felt really bad, like a bad person. I just wanted to know what she had thought when I entered the room.”

The brothers are charged with first-degree murder in the Aug. 20, 1989, shotgun slayings of their millionaire parents. Their first trial ended two years ago in a deadlock.

The defense, however, is seeking lesser manslaughter convictions, contending that the brothers fired out of what attorney Leslie Abramson called “mind-numbing, adrenalin-pumping fear” that their parents would kill them first to hush up a family incest secret.

Erik Menendez testified earlier that family tensions exploded the week of the slayings, when he confided to his brother that their father had been molesting him for 12 years. His father had repeatedly threatened to kill him if he told, Menendez testified, and his mother told him that week she had known all along about the molestation.

After an argument Sunday night, he said, his mother told him, “If I’d kept my mouth shut, things would have worked out in this family.” She shouted at Lyle, “You ruined this family,” he said, adding, “I felt chills.” “It’s happening now,” he said Lyle told him, meaning their parents were about to kill them. The brothers ran for their shotguns.

He said he ran into the den, illuminated only by a TV set, saw the shadow of his father standing by a coffee table, and fired.

He said he believed his parents were firing back. Later, during his vigil, he looked for his parents’ rifles. When he found none, he said he knew he had “made a mistake.”

“Would you have burst into the den and been firing your weapon if you knew your parents didn’t have guns inside the den?” Levin asked.

“No,” Menendez somberly said.