Abuse of McKenna detailed

The younger brother of convicted killer Patrick McKenna blamed a violent father and abusive juvenile probation officers for the monster that his brother has become.

Kenneth McKenna asked a Clark County jury Monday to spare his brother's life and "let him grow old" in prison. The Clark County district attorney's office wants to execute McKenna for killing a cellmate on Jan. 5, 1979, the same day he was convicted of rape charges in a separate case.

Fellow prisoner J.J. Nobles was strangled to death after losing a chess game and refusing to perform a sexual act on the now-50-year-old defendant.

McKenna went through two prior penalty hearings -- both ending in death sentences -- but appeals courts overturned them. The underlying murder conviction was upheld.

Kenneth McKenna, a Reno lawyer who represented his brother in the past, said during emotional testimony that Patrick McKenna accepts responsibility for his actions, but said others also should be held accountable.

Kenneth McKenna detailed a horrific Las Vegas childhood, filled with memories of an alcoholic father who beat his wife on a regular basis and where Metro Police were frequent visitors.

He told how the five brothers would gather in the hallway outside their parents' bedroom with baseball bats, tennis racquets and pots and pans.

"We would stand there with our little weapons, and we would try to muster the courage to go do something," Kenneth McKenna said, sobbing. "We never did."

He and his brother Tim said their family was a victim of a time when police turned a blind eye to spousal and child abuse.

Their mother finally was able to take the three youngest boys and divorce their father when Patrick McKenna was a teenager. Both parents are now dead; their father allegedly died of suicide, though the brothers maintain he was murdered.

This is the first time the public has learned of the widespread prevalence of domestic violence within the McKenna household. Although Patrick McKenna has been part of the criminal justice system since age 15 -- he was sent to Spring Mountain Youth Camp for truancy -- he has forbidden lawyers from introducing it as evidence.

"Pat has always told me never talk about Dad," said Tim McKenna, president of Prudential Southwest Realty and a Henderson resident. "But my dad was a terrible father, even if he treated me well.'

For most of his brothers' testimony, Patrick McKenna stared at the defense table, occasionally shaking his head and smiling when Tim or Kenneth McKenna spoke of pleasant memories. But the majority of the testimony focused on memories that ignited old angers.

Kenneth McKenna recalled a family dinner that disintegrated into punches when his father learned that Patrick McKenna had flunked some classes. Their father threw milk and spaghetti in Patrick's face and then dragged him outside and began punching him while the family was forced to watch, Kenneth McKenna said.

"Pat stood there with his hands down to his sides, fingers out, no fists," Kenneth McKenna said. Then turning to his brother, he said, "You never know how much I wanted you to beat the sh-- out of him. You were big enough."

Patrick McKenna's brothers resent Spring Mountain Youth Camp, where Patrick was sent when he started having trouble in school. Rather than reform the teenage McKenna, juvenile probation officers humiliated and abused him, Kenneth McKenna said.

"They were perverted, degenerate, psychotic, sadistic guards who beat and brutalized the kids and turned them into monsters," he said, referring to a time when Patrick McKenna was chained naked to the flag pole and left overnight. "I'm here to tell you they made Pat who he is, at least to some degree."

Current camp Administrator Richard Ries, who was hired in 1968, seven years after Patrick McKenna was sent there, confirmed that such discipline tactics were used at the time.

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