13-year-old set to use wrestling defense in murder trial

Sunday, January 14th 2001, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. â€“ One of the youngest defendants ever to face an adult murder trial in Florida has a novel defense in the beating death of a 6-year-old family friend: He says pro wrestling made him do it.

Nobody disputes that Lionel Tate smashed Tiffany Eunick's skull. But the boy's lawyer contends it was an accident that resulted from an intellectually immature youth imitating the wrestlers he watched on television.

The World Wrestling Federation is suing the lawyer for libel.

Tiffany's death was one of at least four cases in 1999 in which pro wrestling was blamed when one child killed another.

Opening statements are scheduled Tuesday in Lionel's first-degree murder trial. If the boy, now 13, is convicted of first-degree murder, he faces life behind bars without the possibility of parole until he is 38. Jurors could convict him on a lesser homicide charge.

Prosecutors offered a plea deal that would have sent Lionel to a juvenile facility for three years, followed by 10 years' probation. But he rejected it on the advice of his lawyer, Jim Lewis, who said his client isn't guilty of any crime.

"This was a horrible accident," Mr. Lewis said.

Lionel, who was 12 years old and weighed 170 pounds when Tiffany died, has the intelligence of an 8-year-old, Mr. Lewis said. He says the boy didn't understand that professional wrestling is staged, and thought that if he body-slammed someone they would walk away unhurt, just like on TV.

Prosecutor Ked Padowitz wrote in court documents that Lionel never told anyone he was imitating wrestlers until a month after the girl's death.

Lionel originally told detectives, in a recorded interview that will be played for jurors, that he and Tiffany were playing and watching cartoons at his home in suburban Pembroke Park. He said he accidentally hit her head on a coffee table.

Lionel's mother, a Florida Highway Patrol trooper, was upstairs taking a nap at the time of the death in summer 1999, police said.

Jerry McDevitt, a lawyer for the WWF, said the wrestling defense is Mr. Lewis' fabrication. The Connecticut-based federation, the nation's top pro wrestling organization, has filed a libel suit against Mr. Lewis, saying comments he made on national television and elsewhere defending Lionel have been false and defamatory.

There have been no studies specifically on the impact of pro wrestling on children, said Dr. Howard Spivak, a Boston pediatrician who chaired an American Academy of Pediatrics task force on violence. But he said there have been more than 1,000 studies on how televised violence affects children, and most show that children who watch the most violence are the most violent.