Trial begins for girl in gang fight

Jurors heard opening arguments yesterday in the murder trial of Ashley Benton, the girl accused of stabbing a 14-year-old gang member to death at Chew Park near Montrose last summer. Benton — who was 16 at the time — was involved with the Crazy Crew gang, members of which got into a fight with members of MS-13, the gang with which Granillo was affiliated.

Benton's defense attorneys told jurors Monday that she stabbed Granillo in self-defense because Granillo was swinging a baseball bat at her — and that she wasn't a bad kid, but had fallen in with a bad group. "She was on her way home with another girl that day, and they accepted a ride with somebody that she had no business being with," defense attorney Kent Schaffer said. "They got swept up into something that they had no business getting involved in." (That sounds quite a bit more innocent than the picture the Chronicle painted in its series on the incident late last year, which showed Benton as a girl who schmoozed with Crazy Crew members and bragged about knives she owned.) At the park, Schaffer said, Granillo was about to kill Benton with a baseball bat, so she stabbed him before he could: "She sees him start to turn back around, as if he's going to hit again. The bat goes up, she sticks one time, and the knife went into his heart," he told jurors.

Prosecutors, of course, insisted that Benton was not justified in killing Granillo because he was trying to walk away from the fight when she stabbed him. "She was not acting in self-defense. She was not legally justified in taking his life because at the point that it happened, he had abandoned the encounter and he was running away," assistant Harris County District Attorney Mia Magness said. Prosecutors also noted that Benton went to a Mexican restaurant as Granillo lay bleeding to death in Chew Park.

It should be interesting to see how things work out during the trial: Benton's lawyers said they expect a medical examiner to testify that Granillo had used cocaine within a few hours of the fight, and Schaffer told jurors that they would hear testimony from gang members who had changed their stories every time they talked to the police. Meanwhile, officials have stepped up security at the Harris County Criminal Justice Center for the trial: "We do worry and we have concerns in that we're dealing with a lot of gangs. Gang activity was, of course, the reason for this," J.C. Mosier with Harris County Precinct 1 told KPRC. "Since we're dealing with gangs, we're going to take all the precautions we need to take."