Pubdate: Fri, 24 May 2002
Source: Bristol Herald Courier (VA)
Copyright: 2002 Bristol Herald Courier
Contact: http://www.bristolnews.com/contact.html
Website: http://www.bristolnews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1211
Author: Andrea Hopkins

JURY HEARS EMOTIONAL TESTIMONY FROM FATHER OF MURDER VICTIM

ABINGDON -- Gaines Davis told a federal jury here Thursday he warned 
his son to stop dealing drugs unless he wanted to die.

"I told him, 'You better get out of it because either the law will 
end up shooting you or the ones you work for will end up shooting 
you,'" he said, recalling a conversation he had 13 years ago.

It was just a few weeks later that Davis got a phone call telling him 
his son, daughter-in-law and stepgrandson were dead.

Robert and Una Mae Davis, both 32, and 14-year-old Bobby Hopewell Jr. 
were gunned down at their home in the small Tazewell County town of 
Pocahontas.

"We were getting ready for church. I found out my son had been shot. 
He was laid up in the road. The little boy was inside his room ... 
covered with a field jacket. He had held his arm up to protect 
himself," Davis said, the words coming so rapidly the judge twice had 
to tell him to slow down.

Davis gave his emotional account of his son's death at the end of the 
first day of testimony in the federal trial of one of the men accused 
in the April 16, 1989, killings.

Samuel Stephen "Sam" Ealy, 39, is standing trial on a charge of 
conspiring to commit murder to protect a continuing criminal 
enterprise. He also is being tried on six murder counts -- two for 
each of the three people slain.

Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Ealy and another man 
charged in the killings, Walter L. "Pete" Church, 46. Church is 
scheduled to be tried separately in September.

Ealy claims he is being framed by government witnesses who are trying 
to get out of jail. The former Pocahontas man was tried on state 
murder charges in Tazewell County in 1991 and was acquitted.

Much of the evidence introduced Thursday also was heard by the state 
court jury, with one significant exception.

The federal jury heard about evidence linking Ealy's car, a 
robin's-egg blue 1977 Ford LTD, to the crime scene.

All evidence about the car was suppressed in state court because the 
judge there ruled it was discovered during an illegal search. U.S. 
District Judge James Jones ruled the search was legal at a hearing 
last year.

Light-blue paint was found on a retaining wall near the Davis 
family's home on Merrick Lane, a narrow dead-end street, witnesses 
testified. Part of a broken taillight also was found nearby, they 
said.

Amy Lawrence, a trace-evidence analyst with the state crime 
laboratory in Roanoke, told jurors she compared the broken part of 
the light to the taillight assembly taken from Ealy's car. They 
matched, she said.

She also compared paint from Ealy's car to the paint found on the 
wall and determined they were same color and texture. Both samples 
had body filler in them, she said.

"They could have originated from the same source," she said.

On cross-examination, Lawrence admitted nothing she found proved that 
Ealy -- and not just his car -- was at the crime scene.

David Wayne Popp, who said he used to drink with Ealy at a local 
saloon, also testified about Ealy's car.

Popp told jurors it nearly ran him off the road on the night of the 
killings as he drove home from The Cricket, where he had been 
drinking. But Popp admitted he did not see who was driving the car.

"I seen a headlight coming up behind us. Then, they run us over into 
a ditch," he said.

But another witness, who was a town police officer on duty around the 
time of the killings, told jurors he never saw Ealy's car that night.

William Tabor told jurors he was watching traffic in the town's 
business district from 1:30-3 a.m. and likely would have seen Ealy's 
car had he driven from his home to the Davis home.

But he also admitted he was reading a crime novel at the time and had 
conversations with several people that could have distracted him.

Tabor testified he did see Church -- who is accused of carrying out 
the killing with Ealy -- at around midnight. Church had another man 
in his truck, but the man did not look like Ealy, Tabor said.

"I'm not saying I would have seen every car that came by," Tabor testified.

Much of the rest of Thursday's testimony dealt with evidence 
collected at the Davis home. Jurors watched a videotape of the home 
and saw photographs of the three family members, all of whom were 
killed with a shotgun.

Robert Davis was shot in the chest and head on the road near his 
home, prosecutors have said, adding that they believe the shots came 
from someone in a car.

Una Davis was shot across the chest as she ran toward a neighbor's 
home, then was shot at point-blank range in the head after she fell 
in the yard, prosecutors said. Her son was shot twice as he huddled 
in a fetal position in his closet, prosecutors said.

The prosecution contends Ealy and Church were ordered to kill Robert 
Davis to protect a former county official's drug-dealing business and 
that the other two were killed to keep them from testifying about the 
shooting.

Testimony is to continue at 9 a.m. today.

Ealy was being held in federal custody pending the outcome of the trial.
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