The California Supreme Court Monday upheld a death sentence handed down in 2005 for a man who murdered a neighboring family of four, including a young girl and an elderly woman, at a home in unincorporated Whittier.
Alfonso Ignacio Morales was convicted on April 19, 2005, of fatally stabbing three adults, then sexually assaulting and drowning the 8-year-old daughter of two of the victims. Jurors also found true special circumstances allegations of multiple murders, torture, murder in the commission of a lewd act on a child, murder in the commission of sexual penetration by a foreign object and murder during a burglary.
Norwalk Superior Court Judge Michael Cowell subsequently followed the jury’s recommendation that Morales be executed for the slayings.
While taking note of Morales’ documented learning disabilities, the judge denied a motion to reduce the sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole, saying the “death penalty is warranted.”
Morales killed Miguel “Mike” Ruiz, 37; Ruiz’s common-law wife, Maritza Trejo, 41; their daughter, Jasmine Ruiz; and the father’s grandmother, 75-year-old Ana Martinez, in July 2002.
Trejo’s daughter, also named Maritza, but known by her middle name, Raquel, also lived in the home, but was sleeping at her uncle’s house on the night of the murders.
Morales, now 41, was tied to the crime by physical evidence including DNA on Jasmine’s body, shoe and palm prints found at the home, bloody clothes and knives found on Morales’ property, and fingerprints on goods stolen from the home, according to a summary provided in the court’s opinion.
His automatic appeal challenged the conviction on the basis of insufficient evidence of premeditation and deliberation. The court rejected that claim, citing evidence of planning, motive and manner of killing in various aspects of the crime sufficient to support premeditation and a deliberate intent to kill.
Morales’ attorneys also objected to the testimony of a crime scene reconstruction expert, who detailed the order and manner in which he believed the victims had been killed, starting with a surprise attack on Ruiz.
On cross-examination, defense counsel found that the expert — who had handled thousands of death investigations for the sheriff’s department — had no degrees in criminal forensics or science and had taken only one college-level science course. He made a single trip to the crime scene and had not viewed the bodies firsthand.
The justices found that the expert had sufficient on-the-job training and experience for the trial court to find him qualified to testify. The opinion also noted that the state’s high court only reverses a trial court’s decisions on admissibility if those decisions are deemed to be arbitrary and capricious, which it did not find to be the case here. Finally, it noted that the testimony at issue “did not add meaningfully to the picture already before the jury,” and was therefore harmless in any event.
The opinion also rejected defense arguments that autopsy photos and victim impact statements were overly prejudicial and inflammatory. More general arguments against California’s death penalty also failed to sway any of the California justices.
Morales was a family friend, who lived around the corner from the victims and visited Ruiz nearly every day, according to the court summary.
Deputy District Attorney Alva Lin said outside the courtroom that the slayings may have stemmed from a “dispute over money between Miguel Ruiz and the defendant.”
“There was also some evidence that the motivation was that the defendant was sexually interested in the young girl who was killed. And that may have been one of the motivating factors in this attack,” Lin told reporters.
The court summary said that either money or an incident with Trejo’s daughter Raquel, who shared a bedroom with her stepsister, could have provided a motive for the killings.
Morales had once asked Raquel, whose age was not disclosed in the court summary, to go out on a date with him. She told him “maybe,” but then avoided him.
“On his visits, Morales sometimes briefly interacted with Raquel and Jasmine, usually sharing just quick hellos. But on one occasion, Morales made Raquel uncomfortable by standing in the backyard, staring at her through her bedroom window, and asking her to come outside,” according to court documents.
After the incident, Ruiz asked Morales not to ask his stepdaughter out again, Morales told police. Morales apologized to Mike and his wife after the encounter and bought the family dinner.
The murders occurred sometime between the night of July 11, 2002, and the following morning. Very early on the morning of July 13, 2002, worried about not being able to reach her family, Raquel returned home with her aunt to find everything in disarray and blood and food smeared and spattered on the walls and floors.
The aunt discovered the 8-year-old girl’s body in a bathtub covered by a large statue of some sort, and the other slain relatives together in the grandmother’s bedroom.
Deputy District Attorney Phil Glaviano, who along with Lin prosecuted Morales, called the killings “very brutal.”
“Everyone in the house was killed very violently, and the girl was sexually assaulted,” he said outside the courtroom following sentencing.
Maritza, Ruiz’ wife, had been stabbed 31 times and cut another 14 times.
Along with the murders, Morales was convicted of one count each of first-degree robbery, first-degree burglary, committing a forcible lewd act upon a child and sexual penetration by a foreign object.
During the penalty phase, defense experts testified that Morales had a severe learning disability. Other witnesses said that after his father left the family, some of his mother’s partners were physically or verbally abusive to the boy, according to court documents.
Morales’ mother described him as a child in a man’s body who needed her help in simple tasks like filling out paperwork.
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