Film Deaths Testimony Cites Peril to Children

A witness who says he would have shut down the “Twilight Zone” movie set if he had known children were employed would focus juror attention on the violent deaths of two youngsters, the prosecutor says.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Roger Boren said he would rule today on the admissibility of testimony by Jack Tice, a teacher-welfare worker who was on the movie set the night actor Vic Morrow and two children were killed.

Tice testified outside the jury’s presence that he was kept in the dark about the children’s presence on the set and would not have let them participate in the fatal scene had he known they were there.

If allowed, jurors would once more focus on the most haunting aspect of the “Twilight Zone” case--the violent deaths of Renee Chen, 6, and Myca Le, 7, one of whom was decapitated and the other crushed to death as their parents watched helplessly.

The manslaughter trial of director John Landis, associate producer George Folsey, production manager Dan Allingham, special effects supervisor Paul Stewart and helicopter pilot Dorcey Wingo, is now four months old and the prosecutor does not expect to conclude her case in January.

After hearing more than 70 prosecution witnesses, defense attorneys launched a battle last week to block the testimony of Tice.

The defense team, headed by Nashville lawyer and former Watergate prosecutor James Neal, protested the efforts by Deputy Dist. Atty. Lea Purwin D’Agostino to emphasize the children’s deaths over that of Morrow.

“The most emotional part of this case is that children were killed,” said defense attorney Harland Braun. “But as a matter of law it is irrelevant. The charges are the same whether there were children involved or not.”

Braun noted that the state chose to charge the five defendants with involuntary manslaughter, not child endangerment.

“The issue is very succinct,” Braun told Boren. “These defendants are charged with being criminally negligent, having a reckless disregard for human life. The opinion of a child welfare worker has nothing to do with that standard.”

D’Agostino disagreed vehemently, arguing that the children’s working conditions are a key consideration.

“This was a deliberate child endangerment,” she said. “There was a deliberate effort to keep the fact that children were on the set from Jack Tice, the one person who could have closed down the set. If they (the film makers) had not done that, Vic Morrow and the children would be alive today.

“The jury is entitled to know that a teacher-welfare worker would not have permitted this to go on under any circumstances,” she said.

Tice said he would have judged the scene involving explosives and a helicopter unsafe for child actors and maybe even unsafe for Morrow. He could have and would have shut down the set, Tice said.

“Helicopters do fall out of the sky. People do get hurt by explosions,” he said. “There is no way those children would have been permitted (to work) under those conditions.”