Court Drama Leaves Lawyer Bloody

By the time Thursday’s courtroom demonstration was done, jurors were gaping, the accused killer was crying and his lawyer was bleeding.

Jason Victor Bautista, accused of murdering his mother and dumping her headless torso in a ravine off Ortega Highway, was asked to recreate the fatal January 2003 struggle.

Using his own attorney as a prop, Bautista pinned the lawyer to the floor in the middle of a Santa Ana courtroom, showing jurors how he used a wrestling move called the “death hook” to overpower his enraged mother.

Bautista maintains that he accidentally choked his mother to death as she lunged at him with a knife.

Worried that nobody would believe his story, he cut off her head and hands in the hope authorities wouldn’t be able to identify the body, his attorney has told jurors.

On Thursday, Orange County Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Murray asked Bautista to reenact the struggle, saying it would show that the defendant’s version of events was unrealistic and that the son had actually planned to strangle his mother.

But from the start, Bautista struggled with the task. He had trouble getting his arms around Public Defender Don Robertson, who is larger than Bautista’s 5-foot-7, 170-pound mother, and was unable to lift him off the ground as he said he did his mother.

When Bautista and his attorney rose from the floor, a rug-burn scrape on Robertson’s forehead was bleeding and his client was in tears.

“I need a break,” Bautista told the judge, rubbing his fists in his eyes.

After a recess, testimony again turned emotional when Murray told Bautista to watch the clock in silence for the amount of time he said he lay on top of his mother, his weight pushing her face into the carpet, until she stopped struggling.

Bautista glanced at the clock, then closed his eyes, his mouth moving slightly, as the jurors shifted in their seats.

Two minutes later, the defendant said it had been long enough.

Bautista had told authorities during three different interviews the day he was arrested that he had been on top of his mother no longer than a minute.

He defended the differences between his testimony and the interviews, saying he had “inadvertently” lied. He continued to maintain that he had no idea pinning his mother down would kill her.

“I was in a struggle for my life,” he said. “I was not attempting to choke her.”

He said he has tried to distance himself from the feelings of those weeks two years ago, referring once to cutting off Jane Bautista’s head and heads as a “transection.”

“You’re referring to the dismemberment of your mother’s body as a transection, as a science project?” Murray asked incredulously.

“It’s less emotional for me,” Bautista said, lowering his head.