In handing down a death sentence Thursday for a man who orchestrated the killings of his cousin and two other people in just over a month in 2009, a judge said the defendant went on a “murderous rampage” and deserved the ultimate punishment.
Robert Louis Caballero — who knocked over a chair as he was being led into court by more than a half-dozen Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies — blurted out an expletive as one of his attorneys asked that the jury’s Sept. 16 death penalty recommendation be reduced to life in prison without parole.
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Ronald S. Coen denied the request, calling the crimes “atrocious” and noting that three people were “brutally murdered.”
“You went on a murderous rampage that shows a … callous disregard” for human life,” the judge told the defendant.
Jurors deliberated about an hour before finding Caballero, 37, guilty of first-degree murder for the Sept. 29, 2009, shooting death of Armando Vidana of Pomona, the Nov. 5, 2009, strangulation of Lorraine Minjarez of Covina, and the Nov. 6, 2009, bludgeoning death of his cousin, David Padilla, of El Monte.
In addition to three counts of first-degree murder, Caballero was convicted of two counts of kidnapping and one count each of assault with a firearm, possession of a firearm by a felon and evading an officer.
Jurors found true gang and gun allegations, along with special circumstance allegations of lying in wait, murder during the course of a kidnapping and multiple murders.
Deputy District Attorney Sarika Kim told the panel that Caballero made Minjarez “sit and listen as her grave was being dug.”
The 32-year-old woman’s body was found in the Angeles National Forest along Mount Baldy Road. The prosecutor said Caballero lured Minjarez to a car in a “cold and callous way,” gathered what he needed to kill her, forced her to hike to her gravesite, tightened a rope around her neck as she struggled to breathe and then directed co-defendant Pete Trejo Jr. to bury her body.
Padilla, 29, was bludgeoned and strangled and was found near the Union Pacific railroad tracks near Walnut Avenue in Chino. The prosecutor said Caballero ordered co-defendant Andrew Valenzuela to strangle Padilla because he had decided he didn’t trust him any longer.
Caballero was arrested in November 2009 after a police chase that ended in a crash in Montclair.
At the time, authorities said he was wanted on a warrant for Vidana’s killing. The motive for the 25-year-old Pomona man’s killing was unclear.
One of Padilla’s sisters, Inez Roacho, told the judge that “there are no adequate words to describe the pain, anger and despair that I’ve felt from his murder.”
“… What has kept me focused since David’s murder is the promise I made to myself and my loved ones when I saw him laid out on the cold table at the funeral home, I promised that whomever did this to him that justice would be served and now I pass that promise on to you,” she told the judge while asking him to impose the maximum sentence. “It is my wish that no one ever again would have to go through a tragedy like ours.”
In a statement read by the prosecutor, another of Padilla’s sisters, Isabel Garcia, wrote that “it’s already been five years that he was taken from us, but the pain feels like it was just yesterday.”
In comments addressed to the defendant, the woman wrote, “I pray to God every night that he will give me the strength to forgive you but as for now all I want is you to pay for what you did, because not only did you take a brother from myself and my sisters but because you took a father from my nieces and now they have to grow up without their dad. How do you do that? How do you live with yourself knowing you took someone’s life, not just anyone’s life, but your own cousin!”
Trejo and Valenzuela — who were tried along with Caballero — were sentenced Oct. 3 to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Trejo was convicted of first-degree murder and kidnapping in connection with Minjarez’s death, while Valenzuela was convicted of first-degree murder and kidnapping involving Padilla’s death.
— City News Service