San Jose Mercury News
SAN JOSE, Calif. — A jury Wednesday found Alberto Alvarez guilty of first-degree murder in the 2006 shooting death of East Palo Alto police officer Richard May, a fatal encounter that began with a chase from a fight near a taqueria, ending in a neighborhood driveway scuffle and a gunfire exchange.
The six-woman, six-man jury deliberated six hours before announcing its verdict. The case will now enter a penalty phase, in which the same jurors will decide whether to sentence the 26-year-old man to death. The guilty verdict includes the special circumstance of killing an officer in the line of duty. Alvarez faces life in prison without the possibility of parole, or death row.
Alvarez sat almost motionless next to his attorneys as the court clerk read the verdict.
May’s relatives — including his widow, Diana, and his three daughters — filled the courtroom, holding hands and crying in the tense minutes before the verdict was read.
The officer’s widow said Alvarez deserves the death penalty because “he could have let him live, and he didn’t.”
“He sentenced him to death,” she said. “My husband didn’t have 12 jurors and a judge. Alvarez did. "... He deserves death just like he gave Rich.”
Jurors will return Dec. 7 to begin the death penalty phase of the trial, in which relatives and friends of both May and Alvarez are expected to testify.
“I’m very happy,” 17-year-old Deanna May, one of the officer’s three daughters, said as she left the courthouse after the verdict. “I kind of feel bad for (Alvarez’s) family, but I am without a father, my aunt without a brother. It was everything we wanted.”
“I have said from day one that Rich believed in the justice system, and the justice system worked,” May’s sister Tami McMillan said with obvious relief at a news conference following the verdict.
May chased Alvarez on Jan. 7, 2006, near the scene of a fight at an East Palo Alto taqueria. A scuffle and gunfire exchange in a driveway on nearby Weeks Street left Alvarez with a bullet hole in his right thigh and May dead.
San Mateo County Chief Deputy District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe has said Alvarez opened fire on the 38-year-old policeman because he didn’t want to get caught with a gun, which Alvarez knew would return him to prison on a parole violation. The defendant then ran off but returned seconds later and shot the downed officer again “to finish him off,” Wagstaffe contends.
Two bullets struck May in the face and shoulder, and two others became lodged in his bulletproof vest. The fatal shot entered to the side of his nose, a doctor testified at the trial.
“I am extremely pleased that the jurors could see through the defendant’s lies and find that this was an officer brutally murdered in the line of duty,” Wagstaffe said at a news conference in his office Wednesday afternoon.
Defense attorneys argued during the trial that May struck Alvarez with his police baton and then fired the first shot. Alvarez returned fire, briefly tried to escape and then shot again at the already fatally wounded officer as he moved toward the street in a panicked state, the defense said.
“Naturally we feel terrible and disappointed that the jury obviously rejected our view of the evidence,” defense attorney Eric Liberman said in a phone interview. “Now we have to get down to the business of saving Mr. Alvarez’s life.”
Liberman said his client was “fairly stoic” about the verdict.
“He’s just taking it as it comes,” Liberman said.
The defendant’s father, Leopoldo Alvarez, said he didn’t speak with his son after the verdict and wouldn’t be able to do so until Friday because of visiting rules.
“What can we do?” he said, speaking in Spanish in a resigned voice.
East Palo Alto Police Chief Ron Davis, the slain officer’s former boss, said May performed his job well and lived up to all of his expectations.
“It reinforces the strength of our criminal justice system that the jury did not allow Rich to be demonized when he actually should have been praised for his efforts to the community,” Davis said.
Copyright 2009 San Jose Mercury News