A prosecutor told jurors Friday that a man was linked to a “menacing” series of crimes in and around Malibu Creek State Park, including the killing of a man who was shot to death while camping in a tent with his two young daughters.
Deputy District Attorney Antonella Nistorescu told the downtown Los Angeles jury in her opening statement in Anthony Rauda’s trial that ballistics testing done on a rifle that was in a backpack being carried by the defendant at the time of his Oct. 10, 2018, arrest, linked the weapon to the bullet that killed Tristan Thomas Beaudette on June 22, 2018, and a shooting that damaged a white Tesla that was being driven nearby a few days earlier.
Jurors are set to hear an opening statement Monday from defense attorney Nicholas Okorocha.
Rauda did not appear in court for the trial, with Superior Court Judge Eleanor J. Hunter telling jurors that he had “elected to exercise his constitutional right not to be present.”
Rauda is facing a murder charge stemming from Beaudette’s killing, along with attempted murder charges involving a series of early morning shootings typically between 3 and 5 a.m, including one in which a man who had been sleeping in a hammock initially thought he had been bitten in the arm by an animal.
Rauda is also facing five counts of second-degree commercial burglary involving a series of break-ins, including two at the Calabasas Community Center and two at the Las Virgenes Water District facility between July 2018 and October 2018, that primarily involved food that was taken from the facilities, according to the prosecutor.
After the last break-in, Rauda was tracked down through bootprints and a scent dog to a makeshift encampment, where he was found dressed in black and possessing a backpack that included the rifle subsequently linked to Beaudette’s killing, Nistorescu told the panel.
Nistorescu said the area was the location of a “menacing series of crimes,” the deputy district attorney said of the alleged crime spree.
Beaudette, a 35-year Allergan research scientist from Irvine, was in a tent with his two daughters when his brother-in-law — in a nearby tent — awakened to the sound of pops and heard Beaudette’s daughters calling for their father, the prosecutor said. The leggings of the victim’s youngest daughter were soaked in blood because she was so close to him in the tent, according to Nistorescu.
Deputy District Attorney Brian Kang told jurors that cellphone evidence showed that Rauda had a “regular pattern” of “being around the campgrounds” in the early morning hours, including the day Beaudette was shot to death, and indicated that things that had been searched for on his phone included “bullet hits car gas tank” and a search for Malibu Creek State Park the day after Beaudette’s killing.
Kang told jurors that the prosecution will ask them to return the “only just verdict” — murder for Beaudette’s shooting and the attempted murders of the “numerous people that were terrorized” and the series of burglaries that occurred afterwards.
Following his arrest, Rauda was sentenced in December 2018 to six months in jail for gun and ammunition violations, a sentence set to run consecutively with an earlier 160-day sentence for a probation violation.
Rauda was charged in January 2019 with the alleged crime spree and subsequently indicted in October 2019.
Rauda was sentenced last June to three years and eight months in jail after being convicted of attacking two Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies since he has been in custody. Both of those attacks were caught on surveillance video, and Rauda was subsequently brought into court for further hearings in a chair in which he was confined.