McNamee turned on Clemens over son's illness

By FREDERIC J. FROMMER

WASHINGTON (AP) Brian McNamee testified that Roger Clemens' lawyers pushed him from reluctant turncoat to angry accuser when they allowed details of McNamee's oldest son's illness to be revealed during a nationally televised news conference.

"I was furious," McNamee told the jury in Clemens' perjury trial on Tuesday. As soon as he could, McNamee said, he went to his house and retrieved the medical waste he had collected from injecting the Major League Baseball star with performance-enhancing drugs. McNamee turned the materials over to his lawyers, who in turn gave the materials to federal law enforcement officials. It's now the physical evidence prosecutors are using to try to prove Clemens lied to Congress in 2008 when he denied using steroids and human growth hormone.

The prosecution is expected to show that the evidence contains Clemens' DNA. The defense has called the evidence "garbage" and is expected to claim it is tainted.

McNamee claimed that he kept the evidence a secret - even when he was telling investigators about injections he gave to Clemens - in an attempt to minimize the impact on the seven-time Cy Young Award-winning pitcher.

"I didn't want to hurt the guy," McNamee said. "I knew that would hurt Roger even more."

But in a televised 2008 news conference, when Clemens' lawyers played a taped phone call between the two men that contained references to medical details about McNamee's oldest son, who was suffering from diabetes, McNamee turned against his friend and client.

"My son was 11 years old at the time," he said, as Clemens stared from across the room. "It's beyond inhuman to do that to a kid."

McNamee said he turned over the evidence against Clemens "because of what he did to my son."

McNamee, Clemens' longtime strength coach, testified for a second day, pushing his running total to roughly 10 hours on the stand, including the first few moments of what portends to be a grueling cross-examination that will continue on Wednesday.

The broad outline was familiar from McNamee's previous statements: He said he injected Clemens with steroids and HGH in 2000 and with steroids in 2001, and he gave Debbie Clemens a shot of HGH in 2003. That was in addition to the testimony he gave on Monday, when he spoke of a series of steroids injections he said he gave Clemens in 1998, when he was pitching for the Toronto Blue Jays.

The trial is in its fifth week, and the tedium cost the proceedings another member of the jury on Tuesday. Juror No. 1, a supermarket cashier, became the second member of the panel to be dismissed for sleeping. Her departure leaves 14 jurors, including two alternates.

AP Sports Writer Joseph White contributed to this report.

Updated May 16, 2012