Teran Holliman and his younger brother had barely cracked their teenage years. They were big, young and rangy. They were out to buy some fireworks for the Fourth of July, sitting in a car with their baby sitter, smoking pot.

One event led to the next, prosecutors said, before the baby sitter had roped them into murder.

Holliman, now 22, told all about it from the witness stand Thursday in Sacramento Superior Court. His testimony came in the murder trial of actually both of his baby sitters, Robert Lee Hammons Jr., 26, and Christina Marie Martinez, also 26.

The defendants stared at Holliman from the defense table while the witness told the jury how the three of them, as well as his younger brother Taje Holliman, killed Clayton Skinner, 37, while robbing him seven years ago in his South Natomas home.

According to Holliman, his mother worked with Martinez at the AM/PM on Northgate Boulevard in North Sacramento. He said his mom brought Martinez and her co-worker's boyfriend – Hammons – into their Arcade Boulevard home and hired them to baby-sit him and his brother.

Investigators say the killing took place in the early morning hours of July 2, 2004. Holliman testified that he, his brother and Hammons met Skinner the previous week when the victim approached them while they were smoking pot in the baby sitter's Mustang at the fireworks stand in the AM/PM parking lot where his mother worked. Holliman said Skinner asked them if they were interested in buying a car.

They drove to Skinner's house on Millet Way to check out the vehicle, Holliman testified. While he and his brother waited outside, Holliman said, Hammons ran from Skinner's house with the victim chasing him, "screaming that he'd been robbed."

Inside Skinner's house, a box full of precious stones – gems and rubies – had caught Hammons' eye, Holliman said. Over the next few days, Hammons "kept asking us to go back with him to get the stones," the witness said."

"He said, 'You guys come back with me, I'll do everything else,' " Holliman testified under questioning from Deputy District Attorney Sheri Greco. "My brother said, 'No, we're good,' and (Hammons) kept asking us and kept asking us."

Just after midnight on the morning of the killing, Holliman said, the three of them, along with Martinez, returned to Skinner's house. She knocked on the door under the ruse of buying the car, Holliman said, while talking to Hammons on the phone.

When Skinner made a crude remark to Martinez, Hammons, waiting in the car with the two brothers, heard it. He flipped out in anger, according to Holliman.

"He started banging the steering wheel and said, 'C'mon, let's go,' " Holliman said.

The Holliman brothers and Hammons then slipped into the house, according to the witness. Hammons went upstairs looking for the gems, when Skinner – wary after the previous reported robbery and apparently alerted to the presence of the intruders in his house – grabbed a knife, Holliman said.

"Christina said, 'Baby, he has a knife,' and Robert Hammons came down the stairs," Holliman said. According to Holliman, Hammons picked up a Club anti-car-theft device lying on the floor and smashed Skinner in the head.

Hammons told the younger Holliman, then 13 years old, to "keep him down," the older brother testified. The boy complied, hitting him a couple times with the Club, Holliman said. Martinez joined in with some speaker wire and "attempted to choke him out," Holliman said, before the four left Skinner for dead.

The victim's father found the body the next day. Clayton Skinner was an unemployed draftsman, a bike racer and artist who grew up in the Placerville area, his father said in an interview.

Defense attorneys Paul Irish for Hammons and Philip Cozens for Martinez, will cross-examine Teran Holliman when the trial resumes Monday.

Sacramento police did not break the case until 2009, when Detective Kyle Jasperson ran the records on Skinner's cellphone. Jasperson testified they showed the victim's phone had been used after he was dead – to call Holliman's mother, who had since moved with the boys to Utah.

Holliman pleaded no contest June 20 to voluntary manslaughter and two counts of robbery, according to court records. He said he entered his plea and agreed to testify in exchange for a 15-year prison sentence.

Taje Holliman, now 20, had his case adjudicated in Juvenile Court. The outcome was not immediately available Thursday. Jail records show he is incarcerated in Sacramento, but as a Utah prison inmate.

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