Jackson accuser 'not allowed to leave ranch'

21/04/2005 - 08:33:24
A former security guard at Michael Jackson’s Neverland ranch told the pop star’s child abuse trial that a notice once was posted in a guard station saying Jackson’s young accuser was not to be allowed to leave the estate.

But the prosecution witness, Brian Barron, also said under defence questioning that it would have been appropriate to keep child guests on the estate if their parents were not present and that guards would probably not let any children leave if they were unsupervised.

Barron, a police officer for the town of Guadalupe, moonlighted at Neverland for about three years until leaving after the ranch was raided by sheriff’s investigators on November 18, 2003. He said his superiors in Guadalupe suggested he leave the estate because of the criminal investigation.

He told the court in Santa Maria, California, that he refused a request by the sheriff’s department that he go back to work at Neverland as a law enforcement informant.

Barron said the directive that the boy, Gavin Arvizo, was not to leave the estate was posted during a week-long period in January or February 2003. He said he did not know who wrote it.

He said the instruction written on a greaseboard remained up for about a week.

“We weren’t allowed to let him off property without some sort of permission from the ranch manager,” Barron said under questioning by a prosecutor.

Under cross-examination, defence lawyer Robert Sanger asked whether the general policy at the ranch was that children visiting without parents would not be allowed to leave by themselves.

“We would not let them go off the ranch without supervision,” Barron said.

Barron acknowledged that as a police officer he would have been required to report anything illegal he saw at the ranch but that he never had grounds to do so.

Jackson, 46, is accused of molesting Gavin Arvizo, a 13-year-old cancer patient, in February or March 2003.

He also is accused of conspiring to hold the boy’s family captive to get them to make a so-called rebuttal video, following the airing of a TV documentary in which the boy appeared with Jackson, who said he let children sleep in his bed but, that it was non-sexual. Jackson denies the charges.

The prosecution informed the court on Tuesday, in the eighth week of the trial since opening statements, that it planned to rest its case next week.

Under questioning by Deputy District Attorney Gordon Auchincloss, Barron said employees were tense when Jackson was at Neverland.

“He’s like a perfectionist. Everything has to be right,” Barron said of Jackson.

“There was a lot of work to be done. Everyone was walking on pins and needles a little more to make sure everything was right.”