Coach, Youth Meet Again in Fatal Fight : Violence: Myron (Mike) Haag was trying to chase some teen-agers away from his house. He was killed and prosecutors rule it an accidental death.

ESCONDIDO — Patricia Haag painfully shows the 7-year-old photograph of the Little League team that pictures her husband standing proudly behind the kids he helped coach that season.

“See that little towheaded kid in the back row--yeah, there in the corner?” she asks. “He’s the boy who killed my husband.”

Chances are that the boy, now 18, never recognized Myron (Mike) Haag, whom he knocked to the ground a couple of months ago, killing him when his head slammed against the asphalt in front of his Escondido home.

And chances are that Haag, a 54-year-old airline pilot, never recognized Derreck Lawton, that kid he helped coach in 1985.

On Friday, more than two months after the confrontation, the district attorney’s office ruled that Haag’s death was a “legally excusable” homicide because “it was an accidental killing committed during sudden combat or in response to a sudden and sufficient provocation.”

The violent confrontation ended the life of a man who would walk arm in arm with his son after football practice. Haag was the fellow who, with his wife of 29 years, inflated hundreds of helium balloons before big football games to distribute to other parents. When in the cockpit, he would talk unabashedly about his love for his family, his church and--of course--youth sports.

Haag had landed his American Airlines 757 from Dallas about 5:30 p.m. on March 28 and, as always, Pat Haag was there to meet him. The couple returned to the ranch home where they have lived for 20 years.

Haag headed for bed about 10:30 while his wife watched television. Minutes later she heard her husband outside. He must be trying to shoo away some of the kids who like to party up the nearby hill, she thought.

Suddenly, loud voices cut through the air, growing angrier and peppered with such profanity that Pat Haag cannot bear to repeat it. She stepped outside and heard her husband stating firmly: “That’s right, this is private property!”

She walked down the driveway and heard her husband’s plea, this time with a more nervous edge: “Get this guy out of my face.” She turned the corner past the shrubbery and yelled out in a bluff: “The police are on their way!”

“As soon as I said that,” Pat Haag said, “there was movement toward Mike, and he fell backward. I yelled: ‘Get out of here, you guys, the police are coming!’ ”

Three figures high-tailed it in a pickup truck down the road.

Friends poured out for his funeral, youths from sporting organizations and congregants from Emmanuel Faith Community Church. American Airlines’ chief pilot in San Diego said he had never seen such a gathering of colleagues in uniform, even at formal company meetings.

Then came the wondering: What would come of Lawton, the big burly kid with the ponytailed, dishwater-blond hair?

“Yeah, we were partying up there on Teepee Hill,” Lawton told sheriff’s investigators as his attorney sat at his side. “The three of us stopped in front of the guy’s house so I could urinate,” Lawton said. “The man came out and got in my face,” he said.

“Why are you staring at me?” Lawton said he asked Haag, according to transcripts of his interrogation obtained by The Times. “What are you, a faggot?”

Haag hit him and knocked him to one knee, Lawton said. But the teen-ager picked himself up and swung at Haag. He missed the first time but punched again, connecting squarely on Haag’s face and sending him tumbling backward.

Lawton said he and his two buddies were chased off by Pat Haag. The trio took off for a rural area where they engaged in “cow-tipping”--a late-night sport of trying to body-slam sleeping cows off their feet, to be rewarded by the moo of the fallen, startled animal.

Lawton said he did not learn until Monday morning at school that Haag was dead.

When he heard the news, he asked his teacher for a pass to the counselor’s office but instead took off for home.

“I was like too nervous,” he told investigators. “I was scared. I didn’t know what to do.”

He got an attorney and surrendered to authorities. By 9:15 that night the Sheriff’s Department issued a press release that said the three suspects--Lawton, a 15-year-old and a 20-year-old, had turned themselves in for questioning. The statement noted: “No arrests have been made,” and relayed the following:

“An altercation ensued between Derreck Lawton and Mr. Haag. Mr. Haag struck Derreck Lawton in the face as he approached within inches. Derreck Lawton retaliated by striking Mr. Haag in the face. Mr. Haag fell to the ground.”

Pat Haag says her husband was murdered. She does not know if her husband struck a blow first--she did not see the whole thing, she admits. But if he did, she is convinced that it was in his self-defense.

“If they got boisterous toward him, it would have been his nature to try to calm them down,” she said.

Lawton admitted to authorities he was trespassing.

“I’m the one that did it,” he said. “I’ll probably pay my whole life.”

Lawton’s two companions generally corroborated their friend’s story. Dist. Atty. Ed Miller said there is no evidence that the trio planned their stories.

On Friday, after a review by Deputy Dist. Atty. Craig Rooten, Miller ruled that Lawton could not be held criminally responsible for Haag’s death.

“I just don’t understand where the district attorney is coming from,” Pat Haag said. “It’s insane. You cannot have violent action and irresponsible behavior and go away unpunished.”

Before the ruling, Lawton’s attorney, Dan Cronin, said the family would not comment on the case and was “upset by the publicity” surrounding it. “He won’t get a fair shake in the community because the wealth of public opinion is against him,” he said.