ALAMOGORDO, N.M. — The trial of a New Mexico teen accused of killing his family on Sam Donaldson's ranch opened Tuesday with the veteran newsman evoking images of Vietnam as he described the bloody crime scene.

The ABC correspondent was the state's first witness in the trial of 16-year-old Cody Posey, who has admitted to gunning down his father, stepmother and stepsister on July 5, 2004.

In a videotaped police statement that was played for jurors Tuesday, the teen said he killed his family after he had grown "tired" of his father berating and hitting him.

Though the teen is being tried as a juvenile, he faces an adult sentence of life imprisonment on three counts of first-degree murder and four counts of tampering with evidence.

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After a day of picnicking in New Mexico's Capitan Mountains, Donaldson was the first person to come upon the home of his ranch foreman, Delbert Paul Posey, on July 6, 2004.

He testified he found the kitchen and porch covered in large pools of congealed blood.

"I saw a large, reddish dried swath, which I identified clearly as blood," Donaldson testified in his trademark baritone. "I covered the war in Vietnam, so I saw a lot of it there."

The bespectacled Cody rarely lifted his gaze from the defense table as Donaldson described the teen's father as an honest and hard-working man who immediately put order to Donaldson's cattle ranch after the family moved onto the land in 2001.

Donaldson recalled Paul Posey's third wife, Tryone, as a bright, "bubbly" woman with a knack for finding chores she had not been asked to do.

Cody's 13-year-old stepsister Marilea was a "sparkler" who carried an air of liveliness wherever she went, Donaldson testified.

Even so, "Cody Posey believed that his world would be better off without his family," Children's Court Attorney Sandra Grisham told jurors in her opening statement.

"It was an unbelievably selfish decision that his belief was more important than the most universal, human belief, that life is precious, that thou shall not kill," she told the panel of 12 jurors and four alternates.

Grisham said the teen methodically chose the order in which to carry out the shootings before loading their bodies into a John Deere backhoe and burying them in a pile of manure on Donaldson's property.

"Their world became the pile of manure that he buried them in," she said of the victims.

In his own words

Lawyers for Cody Posey chose to reserve their opening statement for the start of the defense case, but the panel received a preview of his versions of events from a videotaped statement that was played in open court.

For the first hour of the interview, Cody, who was 14 in the video, maintained his innocence, claiming he last saw his family when he left the ranch Monday morning after a fight with his father about raking the corrals.

As related several incidents from his childhood in which his father slapped, punched or choked him, the teen fidgeted with his hat and glasses until the interviewing officers changed their tone.

"OK, and I'm sitting here and I'm watching you, Cody. I mean, you got tears in your eyes, and I need to know why," Lincoln County Sergeant Robert Shepperd said in the video. "You need to tell me what happened."

"I got tired of him hitting me. Yelling and screaming at me all the time. He hit me all the time. I couldn't take it anymore," Cody answered after a long pause. "I tried getting rid of him ... Get him off this planet because I'd be better here without him."

At the defense table, Cody held his face in his hands as he listened to his own account of the events, beginning with a fight with his father and ending when he tossed the weapon into the river and fled the scene.

After the fight, Cody said he got a gun from his stepsister's saddlebag and entered the house where his stepmother sat reading a book on the couch.

Through muffled sobs, he said he shot her twice, because "she was mean, she hit me and stuff."

When his father entered the home with Marilea trailing behind, Cody said he shot him in the head from behind the refrigerator.

As for his 13-year-old stepsister, with whom he said he generally got along, Cody admitted he shot her, "so she wouldn't go tell or nothing."

The teen suggested he was provoked by an incident the night before the shootings in which his parents attempted to force him to have sex with his stepmother.

"They were wanting me to do her or something," he claimed. "She was like, well, we're not related, we're not blood, come do it. And I didn't want to because I thought it was wrong."

Cody claimed his father chased him with a welding rod and burned him for his rebuffs.

Cody's aunt and custodial guardian, Corliss Clees, sat dabbing tears in the audience while the video played. Outside court, she expressed horror at the "magnitude" of the killings, but said she was also not surprised.

"I knew something would happen someday because of the abuse," she said. "But he's really a good boy, and he's terrified right now."

Prosecutors also called former classmate and friend Ramon Zamora, who reluctantly testified that Cody spoke of killing his parents months before the actual shootings.

"He said he wanted his parents dead," the 16-year-old stammered.

Outside the presence of the jury, Judge James Waylon Counts quashed the defense's attempts to elicit testimony from Ramon that Cody made the statement because his father had beaten him.

Court resumes Wednesday. The proceedings will be broadcast live on Court TV and streamed on the Web on Court TV Extra.