Man Says Woman Stormed House, Killed Roommate

Belita Fox, a Lancaster woman charged with murdering a construction worker she accused of giving her teen-age daughter drugs, stormed into the man’s house and pumped three bullets into him as he lay in bed, a witness testified Wednesday in Lancaster Superior Court.

The mother of Kevin Furman, the dead man, sobbed in the audience as his roommate testified that Fox shot Furman in the chest, then shot him twice more as Furman tried to get out of bed.

The roommate, Ronald McCreary, testified in the first day of Fox’s trial on first-degree murder charges. He said he and two other men in the house then fled and heard more shots as they ran.

A bartender testified that Fox, 41, began drinking beer at 8 p.m. Aug. 19, about four hours before the shooting, and talked of her plans to kill a man she said was giving drugs to her 17-year-old daughter.

“She said she was going to shoot him with a .38,” said Cynthia Wilson, a bartender at the Schooner Saloon in Lancaster. “She said she needed to have a few beers before she went and did what she needed to do.”

Wilson said she took no action because she did not take the threat seriously.

The case attracted a flurry of attention when initial news reports inaccurately depicted it as a mother defending her daughter against a drug dealer. But Los Angeles County sheriff’s detectives quickly established that Furman, 23, was not a drug dealer, but a construction worker who used drugs occasionally.

Fox knew that her daughter, Cheryl, was not at Furman’s house because she called her daughter from the house after the shooting to tell her what she had done, then called deputies to turn herself in, investigators and prosecutors have said.

Fox’s lawyer, Vincent Oliver, said in an interview that he believes that Wilson--who admitted during cross-examination that she dislikes Fox, a regular customer--exaggerated Fox’s statements at the bar. Fox will dispute McCreary’s account that Furman was shot as he lay helpless in bed, Oliver said, but he declined to say whether he will argue that his client acted in self-defense.

Fox did not go to Furman’s house intending to kill him, Oliver said. “She was trying to dissuade him from giving drugs to her daughter, who had a heart condition. . . . He was obviously the top guy in the house who was allowing teen-agers to use very serious drugs, such as methamphetamine.”

Cheryl, whose cousin had dated Furman, occasionally visited the house and may have used drugs there on several occasions, sheriff’s investigators have said.

In an interview, Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Foltz described the case as “a simple case of first-degree murder. . . . She was angry and she was going to do something to teach Cheryl a lesson.”

Foltz said a potential obstacle to the prosecution is the possibility that jurors may sympathize with Fox if they believe that she attacked a man who she perceived as corrupting or harming her daughter.