`Kato' Kaelin Turns Serious During Testimony -- Jokes Fade After He Recalls Children

LOS ANGELES - Suddenly, murder wasn't so funny anymore.

Brian "Kato" Kaelin shifted from limelight-loving jokester to reluctant prosecution witness in the O.J. Simpson trial after he was asked about the children whose mother had just been slain and whose father was the prime suspect.

The morning after the killings, 6-year-old Justin was playing a video game in his father's house, Kaelin told jurors yesterday. Sydney, 9, was spread out on a couch, trying to sleep.

Having recounted this image, Kaelin's demeanor changed. No more one-liners. No playing to the camera. Kato Kaelin turned serious.

From there, it was tough questioning by Deputy District Attorney Marcia Clark, who was trying to show that Simpson had time to kill Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman before catching a flight to Chicago.

She grilled Kaelin about his trip to McDonald's with Simpson that night, about thumps he heard coming from an area where police later found a bloody glove, about Simpson's demeanor when he left in a limo for the airport and about blood in Simpson's foyer.

The sharp tone of Clark's inquisition at times made Kaelin look as much like a defense witness as the prosecution's witness.

In fact, Kaelin testified that Simpson and his lawyers, aware that Simpson was a prime suspect, quickly homed in on Kaelin as the man who might clear him.

They tracked Kaelin down at his friend Grant Cramer's house the day after the slayings. Later, Kaelin said, he and Simpson met face to face.

"O.J. said, `Kato, you know I was in the house,' " Kaelin recalled. But he said he told Simpson then what he said on the witness stand - that he never saw Simpson go into his house after they returned from the trip to get hamburgers.

Kaelin, on the stand for a second day, also told jurors about a previously undisclosed quarrel that Simpson had with his ex-wife at their daughter's dance recital just hours before the killings.

"He wanted to talk to Sydney, and I don't think - Nicole wasn't going to give him time to talk to Sydney, and I think they (Nicole Simpson and her children) went off somewhere," he said.

Clark asked Kaelin if Simpson was allowed to spend any time with his daughter. "A short time," he replied.

But Kaelin rebuffed Clark's efforts to portray Simpson as angry and shouting after the recital. And he said that although Simpson seemed "in a hurry" to make it to the airport, he wasn't "frazzled," as Clark implied.

Simpson appeared elated through much of Kaelin's testimony, and at day's end he turned to friends in the courtroom and gave a thumbs-up sign.

Clark, meanwhile, suggested that Kaelin was toning down his testimony from what he told Cramer.

Indeed, a police report obtained by The Associated Press showed that Kaelin was considerably more dramatic and specific when he talked to Cramer about the mysterious thumps and the meetings with Simpson after the murders.

But despite Clark's suggestion that Cramer could hurt Kaelin's credibility, the report shows no major inconsistencies between Kaelin's testimony and what he reportedly told Cramer.

Asked if he still considers himself Simpson's friend, Kaelin said: "I am still a friend. . . . I know my job is to be 100 percent honest and that's something I'm going to do."