Friend to Testify in Casino Killing

The attorney for a friend of murder suspect Jeremy Strohmeyer said Tuesday that his client will testify against the Long Beach teenager in the slaying and rape of a 7-year-old girl, and Gov. Pete Wilson signed an extradition order to return Strohmeyer to Las Vegas for trial.

David Cash Jr.--who says Strohmeyer told him about the casino restroom attack--is “absolutely” prepared to testify, according to his attorney, Mark Werksman. The attorney added that “there is no deal” that makes Cash’s cooperation contingent on not being charged.

Werksman said that although it was understood that future developments in the case could change his client’s status, there presently is an understanding that Cash will not be prosecuted.

Clark County Dist. Atty. Stewart Bell has said he will make his final decision on whether to file charges against Cash after reviewing reports from Las Vegas homicide detectives. But Bell said preliminary police reports “seem to indicate [Cash] was a witness, not a principal.”

The warrant Wilson signed Tuesday clears the way for officials in Nevada to take custody of Strohmeyer--who is being held in the Los Angeles County Jail--and prosecute him in the fatal May 25 attack on Sherrice Iverson of South-Central Los Angeles.

“The rape and murder of Sherrice Iverson was a horrible and shocking crime that stunned the nation,” Wilson said. “It is a tragedy that an innocent little girl was taken from her loved ones, never to grow up and enjoy a full and fruitful life.”

In an affidavit filed in Nevada, Las Vegas detectives say Strohmeyer, 18, has confessed to kidnapping, raping and killing the young girl.

Strohmeyer’s defense attorney, Leslie Abramson, has accused the detectives of coercing the confession and says they have engaged in a deceitful campaign to win a conviction before a trial. Las Vegas homicide Lt. Wayne Petersen has scoffed at Abramson’s charges, saying his officers “don’t coerce confessions from anyone.”

Police say that on May 25, the girl’s father left her and her 14-year-old brother in a video arcade at the Primadonna Resort, near the California-Nevada state line, while he gambled shortly before dawn.

The affidavit says that during subsequent questioning by Las Vegas detectives, Strohmeyer said he had been playing hide-and-seek with the girl in the arcade when they began throwing spitballs at each other. The girl threw a “Caution--Wet Floor” sign at Strohmeyer, and he “admitted this angered him,” the affidavit states.

She ran into the women’s restroom and he followed her, forcing her into the handicapped stall in a corner of the room, the affidavit says. It says that when she continued to struggle, he put his hand over her mouth, removed her clothes and sexually assaulted her. After three women entered and then left the restroom, apparently without noticing what was going on, Strohmeyer noticed that the girl’s breathing had become, in his words, “labored,” the affidavit says.

“He figured she was brain-dead and didn’t want her to suffer, so he put one hand behind her head and one hand under her chin and snapped her head, like he has seen on TV,” the affidavit states. “He heard a loud cracking sound but observed Sherrice to be still breathing, so he snapped her head again, harder, and at [that] point she stopped breathing.”

Coroner’s investigators later determined that the cause of death was “acute asphyxia due to strangulation.” Strohmeyer was arrested after he implicated himself in conversations with two high school classmates whose parents notified police, authorities said.

In their declaration filed to justify the extradition of Strohmeyer, Las Vegas detectives say Cash told them he was told by Strohmeyer about the girl’s killing minutes after it occurred.

That has led some to theorize that Cash could be brought up on charges for not immediately reporting the girl’s death to law enforcement. However, Werksman said Tuesday that in Nevada, unlike California, failure to intervene in an effort to stop a crime in progress is not against the law.

“You are an accessory if you aid and abet or if you somehow continue to hide the crime, but it is not against the law to stand by and do nothing,” Werksman said.