CHILLING TRIAL TESTIMONY SUSPECT'S GIRLFRIEND TELLS OF EXECUTION-STYLE SLAYING.

Byline: Michael Gougis Staff Writer

``If you're going to kill me, kill me. I'm going to die anyway.''

According to testimony at a preliminary hearing Thursday, those were the last words of Desiree Collins, 14, an emotionally disturbed foster-home runaway, as she sat unarmed, staring down the barrel of a 9mm semiautomatic handgun in a North Hills apartment.

A second later, Johnathan Bolden, then 19, of North Hills, who was pointing the gun directly at Collins' head, warned his girlfriend, Diamond Dixon, to stand back.

``I seen a little glow in his eyes. Then the gun goes off. I see Desiree fall back. My ears were ringing,'' Dixon said.

Dixon took the stand on the first day of the preliminary hearing for Bolden, a gang member charged with murdering Collins, as well as two people early the next morning in a restaurant takeover robbery gone awry.

One of the people he killed at the restaurant, prosecutors said, was Eddie ``Blink'' Williams, a fellow gang member and Collins' boyfriend. The other was Carl Scott, a 36-year-old handyman.

Bolden, a member of a gang called Every Womans Fantasy, was in the middle of a three-month-long spree of takeover robberies, carjackings and burglaries across the San Fernando Valley when the slayings took place in February 2002, prosecutors say.

Dixon, 21, who has pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact to murder and robbery, testified in detail about the activities of Bolden and his two co-defendants - Romel Davone Johnson, 28, and Tavares Stefin, 18 - in the weeks leading up to the shootings.

Bolden, Johnson and Stefin each has pleaded not guilty to the 60-plus charges against them. If convicted, they face life in prison without parole; prosecutors already have decided not to seek the death penalty.

Dixon was clearly hesitant about testifying against her boyfriend. She stopped in a corridor leading to the courtroom and didn't move until Deputy District Attorney Phil Stirling said, ``Come on, you can do this,'' then she sobbed when she took the stand.

Dixon detailed how she, Bolden - whose gang moniker was ``Tru'' - and other gang members and friends gathered in the North Hills apartment where they lived with Collins, a habitual runaway from Department of Children and Family Services' foster homes and MacLaren's Children's Center.

``I don't know why they didn't put her in a locked facility,'' Collins' father, Billy Collins, said outside the courtroom. ``They (other relatives) told the social workers she was running away and hanging out with these people.''

After Collins was shot, Dixon testified, the girl was tossed into the back seat of a Ford Escort, and Bolden and a friend drove away and ``dumped her body.'' The next day, Dixon got a phone call from Bolden, who had gone to rob a restaurant in South Los Angeles.

``He said the lick (robbery) went wrong. 'Blink' got shot, he got cut,'' Dixon testified.

Prosecutors said Scott, of Los Angeles, slashed Bolden across the neck with a meat cleaver, then went after Bolden's accomplice and friend, Williams. Bolden got up and emptied a gun into Scott and Williams, who both died.

Testimony in the case is scheduled to resume next week.