Jurors began their second full day of deliberations Monday in the trial of a parolee accused of shooting a teenage girl in the head as she sat in a passing vehicle near downtown Indio.
Vicente Manuel Reyes, 30, of Thousand Palms allegedly perpetrated the attack in 2018. He’s charged with two counts of attempted murder, as well as sentence-enhancing gun and great bodily injury allegations and an allegation of being a prior-strike felon.
The prosecution and defense delivered closing arguments Wednesday, after which Riverside County Superior Court Judge Anthony Villalobos sent the jury behind closed doors to begin weighing evidence from the nearly two-week trial. Jurors returned to the Larson Justice Center in Indio on Thursday to continue deliberations, but the judge gave them Friday off. They reconvened on schedule Monday morning.
“You have to be an excellent marksman to shoot at a vehicle and not kill someone,” Deputy District Attorney Kevin Roeder told jurors in his closing statement. “There was an intent to kill here. The victim, Ashley, was 14 at the time. She did not do anything wrong.”
According to the prosecutor, the victim, now an adult, was in the line of fire because the defendant was targeting the person near her in the sedan passing by his cousin’s house on the night of May 20, 2018.
Roeder recalled the testimony of a man named Lenny, who had attended school with Reyes and became, for reasons not specified, an object of the defendant’s scorn.
Lenny later told Indio Police Department detectives that he was “the intended target” that night as he sat near Ashley, according to the prosecution.
Along with Ashley and Lenny, who was then in his late teens, a 15-year-old boy, a 13-year-old girl and a 5-year-old girl, whose identities weren’t provided, were also in the vehicle, according to police.
Investigators alleged Reyes fired on the vehicle as it traveled through the area of John Nobles Avenue and Monroe Street. The convicted felon was in the neighborhood visiting his cousin’s residence at the time, according to testimony.
Roeder alleged the defendant fired two shots from his handgun through the rear window of the car, striking Ashley in the head. The bullet went through her jaw and knocked out a tooth.
The second bullet nearly struck one of the other vehicle occupants, according to the prosecution.
“When he shot at the car, he did it wilfully,” Roeder said, adding that Reyes fled immediately afterward.
Defense attorney John Dolan insisted all eyewitness testimony was unreliable.
He told jurors in his closing argument that one of the witnesses answered “I don’t know” 75 times while on the stand, raising doubts about the party’s credibility.
“This case is all chaos,” Dolan said, pointing to what he characterized as confusing details presented by the prosecution. “There’s no doubt my client went to his cousin’s house, and then he fled to go home when there were shots heard in the area. The question is whether he was the shooter.”
The attorney said witnesses couldn’t even be certain about the type of clothing the gunman was wearing.
Lacking definitive proof Reyes was the one with the gun left jurors only one way to decide — not guilty, according to Dolan.
Reyes is being held in lieu of $2 million bail at the Benoit Detention Center.
Ashley has no memory of what happened when she was shot. She underwent surgery at a Coachella Valley trauma center and ultimately recovered from the bullet wound.
Reyes was identified as the alleged assailant three days after the attack and was arrested without incident in Cathedral City.
Court records show that in 2012, he and two other juveniles stabbed a boy in the parking lot of an Indio movie theater. Reyes was prosecuted as an adult and pleaded guilty to felony assault a year later.
He was sentenced to five years in state prison but was paroled in summer 2017, according to court documents.