When jurors are told the story of Brandon McInerney and Larry King on Tuesday, they will hear of a confrontation between two middle school boys three years ago that ended horribly for both.

But neither of the boys who were in the E.O. Green School classroom in Oxnard that day will be in the Chatsworth courtroom this week.

King, who was 15, is dead, shot twice in the back of the head as he sat in a computer lab with painted fingernails and a history of wearing flamboyant high-heel boots that matched his sometimes flirty behavior.

McInerney, who is being tried as an adult in the murder of King, is not the 14-year-old boy who police arrested a few blocks from the school on Feb. 12, 2008. Now 17 years old, he tops 6 feet tall, and his square shoulders frame a wide chest. His slicked back, dark hair is a stark contrast to his pale skin that has seen little sunlight in the three years since his arrest.

As jurors hear lawyers start to argue the case, which is expected to last the whole month, they will be asked to go back in time to that day in the classroom, to when King and McInerney were barely teenagers.

They will decide whether what McInerney did was premeditated murder because of King’s sexuality, as the prosecution will argue, or whether McInerney was provoked and acted in the heat of the moment, which deserves a lesser sentence, as his lawyers believe.

“This is an unusual case,” said Pepperdine School of Law professor Harry Caldwell. “Typically, it’s a whodunit scenario, but this is more of a ‘what were they thinking at the time?’ case.”

Case moved out of county

The case was moved out of Ventura County because of the intense media coverage, but finding another venue was a challenge. First it was scheduled in Santa Barbara, then Van Nuys was considered before Chatsworth was settled upon. Ventura County Superior Court Judge Charles Campbell, as well as staff from the county, will go to Chatsworth daily, but the jury will be from Los Angeles County.

The delay in the trial — due to a number of factors, including battles over whether McInerney should be tried as an adult — could hamper both sides, Caldwell said.

From the defense side, it could be hard for the jurors to look at the mature McInerney and see him acting as a boy who turned 14 just 2 ½ weeks before the crime, he said.

But jurors also may wonder why the prosecution took so long to get the case to trial and have trouble seeing it as a “ripped from the headlines” case, he said.

About the only thing Maeve Fox, Ventura County senior deputy district attorney, and defense attorney Scott Wippert agree on is that they had to pick a jury that won’t be biased by King’s sexuality or McInerney’s age.

“When we pick this jury, one of the questions we ask them, as we do every jury, is, ‘Can you put aside your sympathies and can you evaluate the facts objectively?’ ” Fox said of the three-year gap between McInerney’s age at the time of the crime and now. “There is a twist in every case, and sometimes you have people that look young or old and sometimes you have people who are overweight or underweight or brown or black or white. It makes no difference.”

Wippert agreed the ability to pick the jury is huge, but from a different standpoint.

“It’s human nature to look at him in a different light,” he said of his client’s aging. “We need to make sure that the jury understands this happened when he was a child.”

100 witnesses could testify

The weeks of jury selection and pretrial motions leading up to Tuesday’s opening statements have given a hint to how each side may proceed with the arguments.

There are more than 100 potential witnesses that could be called, from police officers to E.O. Green students to a white supremacy expert. There were mentions in court of how King and McInerney had altercations leading up to the shooting, when King told McInerney he had a crush on him.

Fox said she plans on calling an expert to link McInerney to a white supremacist who was the “key” to understanding how McInerney became exposed to white supremacist ideology. One of the tenets of white supremacy is anti-gay, and people are encouraged to act as a “lone wolf” to carry out white supremacy ideals, Fox said during pretrial motions.

Wippert argued during pretrial motions to allow King’s many psychological records into court to help explain the environment that McInerney was dealing with. Wippert also alluded to McInerney’s troubled upbringing in an Oxnard home where drugs and domestic violence were common. He said McInerney will decide to take the stand after the evidence is presented.

During pretrial motions, McInerney sat almost motionless as his fate was argued, looking ahead or gazing down at the table. About the only time he showed any emotion was when he talked about football with Wippert during a break.

Robyn Bramson, McInerney’s second lawyer, said that’s typical of him today as much as it was three years ago. He’s a stoical figure who is hard to read, she said.

Wippert said he doesn’t plan on arguing whether McInerney pulled the trigger. He hopes to convince the jury that, if anything, McInerney is only guilty of voluntary manslaughter, which carries a much lighter sentence than the murder and hate crime charge he is facing, which carries a sentence of up to 53 years to life.

“We are confident that after all the evidence is heard that the jury will agree with us that this was a crime of passion, and they will understand this was a horrific act done by a really good kid,” Wippert said.

Case garners national attention

The trial is likely to gain national attention, just as it did when King was killed three years ago. In the wake of the shooting, talk show host Ellen DeGeneres, who is a lesbian, talked about King on her show, saying, “Larry was not a second-class citizen. I’m not a second-class citizen. It is OK if you are gay.”

National gay and lesbian groups brought up King’s case as an example of the hardships of young homosexuals being victimized.

Though there was outrage in the gay community after the shooting, there also has been some sense of compassion as people have learned about McInerney’s troubled past, said Jay Smith, executive director of the Ventura County Rainbow Alliance, which is closing its doors due to lack of funding.

“It’s a lose-lose situation here,” Smith said. “The biggest thing I have learned here is that there are two families with huge losses.”

Greg King, who says his son was struggling with his sexuality at the time of his death, said he has no problem if Larry is embraced as a cause célèbre in the gay community — he just wants this to end more than 40 months after it started.

“We hope to get some finality out of it,” he said.

McInerney is being tried as an adult in part due to Proposition 21, a ballot measure passed in 2000 that allows the district attorney, not a judge, to decide whether a juvenile can be tried as an adult.

Wippert unsuccessfully fought to get his client tried in juvenile court and said that as his case has moved forward, he has seen lots of issues that could land the case in an appeals court down the road.

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