Onstott trial brings testimony of sex and a pond

[Times photos | Ken Helle]

The murder trial of David Lee Onstott, who’s accused of killing 13-year-old Sarah Lunde in Ruskin three years ago, is continuing today.

This morning’s key witness was Darryl Daoust, above, a gum-chewing 18-year-old with curly hair and a goatee. Daoust was a friend of Sarah’s older brother Andrew Lunde at the time that Sarah was killed. Daoust testified this morning that when he was 15 and Sarah was 13, they had sex twice at the Lunde house when Sarah’s brother and mother weren’t around.

Onstott’s defense attorney, Assistant Public Defender John Skye, questioned Daoust about his relationship with Sarah, getting Daoust to acknowledge that he didn’t admit to detectives that he had sex with Sarah until they confronted him with DNA evidence from Sarah’s bed a year after her death.

Skye was hammering away at Daoust's credibility because Daoust also recounted an incident that prosecutors say incriminates Onstott in Sarah's death.

Daoust repeated a story that Andrew Lunde testified to the previous day -– that the two boys drove to Taco Bell about midnight on Saturday night, April 9, 2005, to get Sarah some food, and when they got back to the Lunde home Sarah was gone, the front door was wide open, and there was an empty beer bottle on a table by the door. "When we walked in, the carpet was kind of folded over in the entryway there, and there was a beer bottle to the left," he said.

Prosecutors say that Onstott showed up at the Lunde house drunk to have sex with Sarah Lunde's mother, but that he found Sarah home alone instead, struggled with her and killed her.

Like Andrew Lunde, Daoust testified that after Sarah disappeared, Onstott then showed up in the middle of the night, picked up the beer bottle and left. (Click here for a time line of the events surrounding the murder.)

Next, two Hillsborough County sheriff’s officials -- Capt. J.R. Burton and Detective Lisa Croissant -– testified that a week after Sarah disappeared, after a big search, a search-and-rescue dog found Sarah’s decomposed body face-down in a pond in an abandoned fish farm in Ruskin.

Prosecutors introduced into evidence four concrete patio blocks that were used to weigh down Sarah’s body in the pond. Sitting on a courtroom bench, Sarah Lunde’s mother, Kelly May, bit her knuckle and looked anxious. She plans to sit through the whole trial, although she says some of the testimony is difficult to hear.

Prosecutors also showed an aerial photo of the pond with Sarah's body in it, although the body was just a speck in the photo.

Onstott, dressed in a dark suit jacket and sitting at the defense attorney’s table at the front of the courtroom, watched all of this impassively, but occasionally with a quizzical expression crossing his face.

Another witness who testified this morning was Jimmy Dale Seaton, 43, who was escorted into the courtroom in an orange jail jumpsuit. He was recently jailed on charges of aggravated battery with a deadly weapon and false imprisonment.

Seaton worked on the same construction crew as Onstott at the time of the April 2005 murder. They were framing houses.

Sarah Lunde disappeared late on a Saturday night. Her family reported her missing that Monday. Sheriff’s detectives questioned Onstott for hours that Monday night because he was a registered sexual offender who had been seen at the Lunde home that weekend. Early that Tuesday morning, Onstott showed up at Seaton’s efficiency apartment in Ruskin asking if he could stay there.

Seaton testified that he went to work. When he got back from work, Onstott was still there. Onstott was intently watching the television news, flipping between stations to catch reports on the Sarah Lunde case, Seaton said.

“He was going from channel to channel on the news stations. He kept turning it up to where he could hear it … it was about that little girl, Sarah Lunde. He had his ear down by the TV,” Seaton said.

Onstott didn’t want Seaton to open his door or tell anyone that Onstott was there. Neighbors started knocking on the door to check on Seaton, who usually kept his door open. Each time one of Seaton’s neighbors came to his door, Onstott hid in the bathroom, Seaton said. Finally, Seaton called the Sheriff’s Office.

Seaton also testified that Onstott had once demonstrated a choke hold on him that Onstott said he used on rowdy bar patrons when he was a bouncer. Seaton demonstrated the hold for the jury, holding his own arm up to his throat. Prosecutors told the jury yesterday that, after Onstott was charged with Lunde's murder, he told a jail guard that he had killed Lunde with a choke hold.

This afternoon, FBI forensics expert Maureen Bottrell testified that she compared the dirt on Onstott’s Nike tennis shoes, which investigators confiscated, to a series of soil samples from the fish farm where Sarah’s body was found. For two of the soil samples, she said she couldn’t rule out the possibility that it was the same as the dirt on Onstott’s shoes.

However, Onstott’s defense team pointed out that the FBI cannot say that the dirt on Onstott’s Nikes is from the fish farm.

Assistant public defender Anna Frederiksen-Cherry asked the FBI expert: “Is there any way for you to tell this jury how many other places in the world would have the same type of soil that we’re talking about?”

“I cannot,” Bottrell answered.

Most recently, the trial featured photos of Sarah’s dead body in a fish pond and gruesome testimony about the condition of her body and the contents of her stomach. Christina Roberts, a forensic pathologist and former Hillsborough County medical examiner who performed an autopsy on Sarah, said the girl died of crushing blows to the head that fractured her skull.

Roberts said it was impossible to tell whether Sarah had been raped or strangled because her body was too bloated and decomposed. This is an issue in the trial because a jail guard is expected to testify that Onstott told him he strangled Sarah.

-- Mike Brassfield, Times staff writer