Testimony: Man casual after killing

MANASSAS, Paul Powell sat down in the living room and smoked a cigarette after fatally stabbing 16-year-old Stacie Reed inside her Yorkshire home Jan. 29 following an argument about her black boyfriend, a Prince William police detective testified Thursday.
About an hour later, Powell attacked 14-year-old Kristie Reed when she got home and found her sister dead, according to the testimony of Prince William police Det. Richard Leonard.
He admitted sexually assaulting her, stabbing her and then taking a glass of iced tea before leaving the home, Leonard testified at Powell's preliminary hearing in Prince William Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court.
"She freaked out, " Leonard said, recounting what Powell told him of Kristie Reed's reaction to her sister's lifeless body. "She started screaming at him."
Powell, 21, is charged with murder, rape, abduction, malicious wounding, grand larceny and three counts of use of display of a firearm in the commission of a felony in the Jan. 29 attacks.
During a 45-minute preliminary hearing, Leonard recounted the conversation he had with Powell when he was picked up for questioning the day after the brutal attacks inside the Reeds' McLean Street home.
Judge James B. Robeson sent the case to the May grand jury after hearing testimony from Leonard and Robert Culver, the fiance of Stacie's mother. The defense put on no witnesses.
Police allege Powell was upset that Stacie was dating a black youth and that he waited for her at her home, confronted her and then killed her.
Powell and the Reed sisters are white.
Leonard testified Thursday that Powell told him that he went to the Reeds' home some time before noon Jan. 29 and waited for Stacie to come home from Osbourn Park High School.
He smoked a cigarette on the porch, had a couple of beers and left because her mother's fiance was due to come home for lunch, Leonard testified.
Powell returned about 45 minutes later, saw Stacie come home and sat inside while she talked on the telephone with her boyfriend.
After the phone call, Powell confronted Stacie about her boyfriend and the two got into a scuffle. She "grabbed his face" before he pulled out a knife and stabbed her, Leonard testified.
"In his words, she got stuck, " Leonard said.
Powell said he was still inside the house when Kristie arrived from Parkside Middle School.
Powell told the to remove her clothes, then admitted tying her up with her shoe laces and stabbing her, Leonard testified.
Leonard said Powell told him he fondled her and had "sexual intercourse" with her.
Robert Culver, who lived with the Reed family, said he returned home to find Stacie's body in an upstairs bedroom and Kristie calling out for help.
"She looked very scared and very weak, " Culver said of the younger girl.
He said he discovered a 6-inch kitchen knife missing from the house.
Leonard testified that although Powell told him he bought crack cocaine and heroin some time before the attacks and that he had had about three beers on Jan. 29, he appeared "coherent" during the interview and willing to speak.
After his arrest, police searched a house on Old Hickory Lane in Manassas where Powell had been staying and seized a gun, 9 mm bullets, handcuffs, an ammunition pouch, ear plugs and a box, Leonard testified.
Powell sat quietly at the defense table during Thursday's testimony, his ankles shackled in leg cuffs. He tapped his foot and stared ahead without expression.
A green tattoo of an eyeball surrounded by decorative markings peeked out from the collar of Powell's jail jump suit.
Kristie Reed did not attend Thursday's hearing. Her mother, Lorraine Reed, and a family friend sat close together in the second row of the spectator area of the courtroom.
Lorraine Reed sobbed quietly when Commonwealth's Attorney Paul Ebert asked Leonard to identify graphic photographs of the sisters taken after the attacks.
In a one-page, typewritten statement issued Thursday, Reed described the "pain" and the "scars" her family has suffered.
"We could torture this human being minute by minute, day by day for a thousand years, but it will never be enough to satisfy our family, " Reed wrote.
Reed said her family will "push" for the death penalty but they understand that the crime may not qualify for that punishment.
"But if he should have to spend the rest of his life in prison, then so be it, " according to the statement. "But please remember that God will justify it all in the end. And this is what keeps us going. Knowing that the day will come that he will have to face God and answer that one question, why?"
Powell told the Potomac News in a February interview that he would prefer the death penalty to a life sentence.