PHOTOGRAPHER'S RFK CLAIM BACKED.

Byline: Daily News Staff and Wire Services

A filmmaker who asserts that an unknown gunman killed Robert F. Kennedy testified Tuesday that he saw a young photographer in the Los Angeles hotel pantry where the senator was shot.

Ted Charach, who produced and wrote ``The Second Gun'' and two other documentaries about the June 5, 1968, assassination, stood behind Scott Enyart's claim that he was at the scene of the shooting.

Enyart testified weeks earlier that he stood atop a steam table, snapping away photos in the midst of the chaos. City attorneys contend that Enyart was not in the pantry at all.

Charach, a free-lance broadcast journalist in 1968, testified that he entered the pantry a few seconds after the shooting and saw Ethel Kennedy, football star Roosevelt ``Rosey'' Grier, Olympic decathlete Rafer Johnson and Enyart - who was perched on a table in the middle of the pandemonium.

Enyart is seeking $2 million in damages against the city in compensation for film he says was lost or destroyed after police confiscated it following the shooting.

Enyart contends that his film is especially valuable because he was the closest photographer to Kennedy when the shots first rang out.

On Tuesday the Los Angeles City Council agreed to shell out an additional $275,000 to defend itself in the civil case, bringing the city's defense costs to $547,829, officials said.

Assistant City Attorney Edmund Fimbres and Skip Miller, a private attorney working under contract for the city, declined to comment about the need for additional funds.

But Christine Harwell, the plaintiff's attorney, remarked, ``I think they've dug a hole for themselves and they're stuck with it.''

Harwell has suggested to jurors that the city of Los Angeles hid or perhaps destroyed the film in an elaborate cover-up. Other plaintiff witnesses, including a researcher working on Sirhan Sirhan's current appeal, have been called to show that evidence from the Kennedy assassination has been suspiciously misplaced, misfiled, mislabeled or is nonexistent.

But Miller has told the Superior Court jury that the film was mislabeled in the aftermath of the 1968 assassination, then misplaced for more than 20 years. The mystery was solved last fall, he said, when investigators learned that photographs held by California State Archives officials in Sacramento were indeed Enyart's, filed under someone else's name for all these years.

But Enyart, who shot the roll as a 15-year-old amateur photographer for his Fairfax High School newspaper, doubts that the film found in state archives is his.