Tuesday, April 16, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.
For the second time in unrelated murders, a teenager has fingered 25-year-old Kevin Lisle as the killer.
Adam Evans, 16, also implicated 25-year-old Jerry Lopez in the slaying two years ago of 19-year-old Justin Lusch, the son of the then-chief of the North Las Vegas Police Department.
Evans told a jury Monday in District Judge Sally Loehrer's courtroom that Lisle and Lopez had left a gathering of friends in August 1994 to seek Lusch and returned a short time later to announce that they had killed him.
Evans quoted Lisle as stating, "I got him. I smoked him. I shot him in the back."
Lopez, the witness testified, added, "We got him good and nothing's going to happen."
And nothing did happen for more than a year as Metro Police searched vainly for the killers who had left Lusch face down off a dusty road northwest of Las Vegas with bullets in his back and chest.
It wasn't until a deal was cut by prosecutors with Evans and 18-year-old John Melcher in another murder that the case blossomed in Lusch's death.
The teenagers had been arrested along with Lisle for the October 1994 murder of Kip Logan after a traffic altercation on the U.S. 95 Expressway at Valley View Boulevard ended in a shooting.
In exchange for having the felony charges in adult court dropped against them, Evans and Melcher agreed to testify against Lisle in both slayings.
Melcher took the witness stand today.
The teenagers subsequently entered guilty pleas in Juvenile Court to charges of being accessories to a murder. They were both given probation but Evans currently is in a youth camp after violating his probation by smoking marijuana.
Yet he followed through with his pledge to be a key prosecution witness with his testimony that Lisle and Lopez had expressed concern that Lusch was going to "snitch" on them over the defendants' alleged drug dealing.
Although Evans admitted having smoked marijuana and drank a six-pack of beer during the evening he witnessed the conversations, he said that had no effect on his recollections.
But under cross examination by Lopez's attorney, Lizzie Hatcher, Evans flip-flopped about whether Lopez was at the home of another teenager when Lisle admitted the murder.
Hatcher noted that Evans had testified at a preliminary hearing that Lopez wasn't present and asked the witness if he was telling the truth at that hearing.
"Yes," Evans answered.
"So Lopez was not present?" Hatcher emphasized.
"No," Evans replied.
Lusch was the son of then-North Las Vegas Police Chief Ron Lusch, although Deputy District Attorney Doug Herndon told the jury during opening statements that Justin Lusch had moved out of his father's home because of problems getting along.
But the prosecutor said the alleged small-time methamphetamine dealers still believed their activities had been compromised by Lusch's connection to his father.
Evans said that after the slaying, the defendants took the murder weapon to the so-called Naked City section of Las Vegas, behind the Stratosphere Tower, and sold it.
Lisle and Lopez face the possibility of the death penalty if they are convicted of Lusch's murder. Lisle already has been given a death sentence by the jury that convicted him of the slaying of Logan.
Herndon said that Lusch, like most of the young adults who would hang around or even sleep at the house, was having trouble getting along with his parents.
Lusch telephoned one of his friends on the night of Aug. 21, 1994, to say he was going with "the vatos" to get some methamphetamine and would return in a few minutes.
Herndon said "the vatos" is what Lisle and Lopez called themselves.
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