For the last month, the prosecutor built a case brick-by-brick, without editorial comment, against the three men accused in the pot-robbery killing of a Land Park teenager five years ago.

Tuesday, in the closing arguments in the trial of the three men accused of murder in the Jan. 3, 2006, shooting death of James Ramirez in the foyer of his parents' home, Deputy District Attorney Sean Laird said it was time to "tell it like it is."

"The evidence in this case revealed these three men to be monsters," Laird said, turning toward Alex Brown Jr., Terry Larell Alexander and David Jacob Carrera.

Brown, 34, Carrera, 33, and Alexander, 26, are each charged with murder in the death of Ramirez. They're also accused in 20 additional counts of robbery, kidnapping, forced oral copulation and assault.

The other charges stem from an attack on two other men the night of Ramirez's death and for another alleged robbery and added sexual degradation of two reputed drug dealers and two of their friends a week before the killing.

On several occasions Tuesday, Laird squared up to the defendants, looked them straight on and offered jurors specially tailored descriptions and analysis on each of the three, one at a time.

Alexander, he said, "reveled" in the sexual degradation of four victims in an earlier robbery.

He characterized Brown, the reputed gunman, as "this coward" who gunned down Ramirez and hit a woman in the midsection with a claw hammer.

Laird described Carrera as the leader so brazen he didn't even wear a mask in an earlier drug robbery and dropped gang names to keep his victims from snitching to police. "On Oak Park Bloods," Carrera told the victims of the robbery, the week before the Ramirez killing, according to Laird. "If anybody talks, I'll come back and kill you."

Laird called Carrera the "manipulative" one who got Brown and Alexander "to do his work," the ringleader with $7,000 in robbery money in his pocket when detectives caught up with the crew.

Collectively, Laird argued, the defendants added up to a trio of "sick sociopaths."

Attorneys for the three defendants will argue their cases today in Sacramento Superior Court before Judge Michael A. Savage.

In private remarks in courthouse hallways, local police and prosecutors have said the weeklong crime spree that culminated in Ramirez's death is one of the most vicious they have seen in the Sacramento area in recent years.

In walking the jury through the evidence, Laird flashed a picture of James Ramirez in his McClatchy High School graduation robe on the courtroom screen. At the time of his death, Ramirez had gained a reputation as a fairly successful neighborhood pot dealer, witnesses testified at trial, making enough money in the field to ultimately attract the attention of tougher and meaner elements and draw them into his comfortable Land Park neighborhood, Laird said.

The prosecutor said Ramirez was "too big for his britches," but that he was "nothing like the defendants."

"James Ramirez made some mistakes, like young kids do every day, good kids," Laird said.

But in Ramirez's case, they were mistakes that according to the prosecutor, "invited three people into his world who came there in the middle of the night."

Laird said Brown, Carrera and Alexander were out to make a name for themselves in Oak Park as "the biggest bad-asses around," hard-core thugs who "wanted people to submit to their authority, say 'yes sir' and 'no sir,' doing whatever they wanted."

The night of the killing, they first contemplated robbing a visitor in a house they rented on 15th Avenue in Oak Park, near 44th Street. The visitor instead directed them to two of his friends who lived on 18th Avenue. Brown and Carrera broke into their house and pistol-whipped the pair into submission. Then, when the intruders weren't satisfied with the take, they beat one of their victims into giving up his higher-level connection.

Then it was on to Ramirez's house on Francis Court in Land Park, Laird said. Outside the residence, they met up with Carrera who was driving a Hummer and working on a relationship problem with his girlfriend, according to the prosecutor.

It was the girlfriend, Sophia Garduno, who turned out to be perhaps the key witness in the case. She identified Brown as going up to Ramirez's window with one of the men they abducted on 18th Avenue.

"And there's no explanation for it," Laird said, of Brown's purported blast from a .40 caliber Glock that killed Ramirez. "He absolutely murdered someone. He shoots him right in the chest and explodes his heart."

Garduno testified that Brown told his partners, "I had to do it," because Ramirez had grabbed for the gun.

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