MOTHER GIVES TESTIMONY IN SON'S DEFENSE; STATEMENTS CONTRAST WITH KILLER'S LETTER.

Byline: Jesse Hiestand Daily News Staff Writer

In hushed tones, the mother of convicted murderer Alan Brett Holland testified Thursday that her only son went from a well-behaved student to a teen-age runaway, saying he might have suffered brain damage after extended exposure to flea poison.

Unable to hold back tears, Sandina Cartier told a Ventura Superior Court jury she did her best to get her son back on the right track, even after he took her car on a joy ride - for the third time in one year - to Louisiana in 1982.

``I was frustrated, bewildered,'' she said. ``I just wanted him to come back and be part of the family. I couldn't understand why he wanted to go.''

After that final joy ride, Cartier said, she did not see her son for 14 years. He showed up at her Miami home in 1995, stole her credit cards and hit her during a struggle over the keys to her car.

But Cartier's version of events contrasts with claims Holland made in a chilling 10-page letter he sent to a Ventura County deputy district attorney on Christmas Day.

Holland was convicted earlier in December of first-degree murder in the 1996 fatal carjacking of Mildred Wilson.

In the letter, Holland complains bitterly of how he was treated by his mother. Holland said he did not run away from home, but was rather abandoned to the streets by her.

The handwritten letter contains such incriminating details and admissions about Holland's role in Wilson's murder that prosecutors have read portions of it to the jury during the trial's penalty phase, which could bring Holland the death penalty.

``I killed some dumb bitch that should've shut her mouth and got into her car when I told her to . . . quit pushing her luck,'' Holland wrote in the concluding paragraph of the letter.

Wilson, a 65-year-old widow from Oxnard, was shot once in the chest in the Poinsettia Pavilion parking lot in Ventura on July 20, 1996. Witnesses testified that the suspect fled in the victim's car, which was abandoned a block away.

In last month's trial, prosecutors presented evidence that Holland left a fingerprint in the victim's car, used her credit cards hours after the shooting, and made a confessional statement after a jailhouse suicide attempt.

The defense presented no evidence and jurors convicted Holland of first-degree murder, carjacking and a special circumstance of murder during a carjacking that will send him to prison for life or to Death Row.

Holland, 30, starts his letter to Deputy District Attorney Don Glynn by expressing admiration for the no-nonsense way Glenn presented the evidence and secured the conviction.

At first, the defendant refers to himself in the third person as he writes of ``a guy who one day kills someone.''

In the letter, Holland tells Glynn about a person who had been living peacefully in his car, getting by on panhandling, until he ``loses touch with reality and the worth of life altogether and gets so heavily into snorting and smoking speed and crack cocaine that he becomes something he never was before - you say evil. I must honestly agree with you.''

Making his way through the shopping mall parking lot, Holland says, he asked a woman for change but she responded by yelling at him and telling him to get a job.

Holland claims the victim poked him in the chest and called him a scumbag, prompting him to tell her to shut up.

``She keeps egging and egging him on and on and on (that) he pulls out a gun,'' Holland says in the letter. ``This guy is so pissed off he shoots her once and she falls down.''

Then Holland takes direct responsibility in the letter.

``I didn't feel bad about it either, which I guess makes it worse in societies (sic) eyes because I feel no remorse and I also feel no guilt and I just don't care about anyone else anymore,'' he states.

Holland says the victim was lucky to die so quickly. He also says he looks forward to spending life in prison and feels God has ``cured'' him by taking away the need to worry about caring or providing for himself in the future.