He slammed them all down for life – no chance of parole. He piled on another 2,492 years between them. He even ripped the Probation Department for suggesting midterm sentences on some lesser counts. "Inexplicable," he said of the recommendations.

There was no doubt Sacramento Superior Court Judge Michael A. Savage brought his big bat Friday and swung for the fences. Alex Brown Jr., David Jacob Carrera and Terry Larell Alexander, sitting quietly at the defense table, felt the judge's sting.

They're going away forever for the murder of a Land Park teenager. The kid had sold pot to his friends and the killers thought he had some money. One of the three shot him in the doorway of his parents' home on Francis Court.

The murder of James Laskey Ramirez was "in some ways, inevitable," Savage said Friday. Brown, Carrera and Alexander, he said, had been on a tear. The week before the Jan. 3, 2006, killing of Ramirez, they broke in on an Oak Park dope den and robbed everybody. They tied up the victims and made them perform sex acts on each other. One defendant took pictures on his cellphone.

The night before they killed Ramirez, the defendants had smashed up a couple friends of the McClatchy High grad, the evidence showed. They threatened to kill them if they didn't find them somebody better to rob. The friends led the crew to Francis Court. Just before the sun came up the morning of the murder, Brown shot Ramirez in the chest in the apparent belief the 18-year-old had tried to grab his gun away.

"Horrifically over-the-top beatings weren't enough," Savage said, in handing down the sentences. "Sexual sadism wasn't enough. Repeated threats to kill apparently did not satisfy. To complete the hurricane of sin and devastation, somebody was going to be killed. The only question was who."

The judge's words were as hard as any heard from the Sacramento bench in recent years. He said he didn't have "adequate words to describe the level of malevolence and depravity displayed by these three individuals."

"What's most amazing about these crimes is the chronology," Savage said. "After the events of (the Dec. 27, 2005, attack in Oak Park), where each defendant participated in acts of subjugation and sexual humiliation that would have made a first century Roman emperor blush, not one of these men took a moment to reflect or pause or ask himself, what in the world have I become?

"Within a week, they were all right back in the violent robbery business."

Besides the murder, jurors convicted each defendant of 20 other felonies – attempted robbery, kidnapping, five counts of robbery, carjacking, three counts of assault with a deadly weapon, six counts of forced oral copulation and three counts of sexual penetration with a foreign object.

Savage took 20 minutes to read through the counts and parcel out the time. Along with their life-without-parole terms, Brown, 34, received 544 more years. Alexander, 25, got another 478. Carrera, 33, a three-striker, took on an additional 1,470 years. Savage expressed irritation with the county Probation Department over its middle-term recommendations on a couple of the counts.

"It is this court's intention to sentence these defendants to every day of the punishment available to me," he said.

County Probation Chief Don Meyer shrugged off the remarks. "The courts are free to talk to us any time," he said. "That's who our bosses are."

Barbara Ramirez, the mother of the murder victim, recalled a boy who went to Leonardo da Vinci School before McClatchy, who liked poker, golf and cars, and had been taking college math courses.

She acknowledged her son had been arrested for pot. He'd been out of jail only a matter of days before his death. But she said he learned his lesson and vowed he was done with the business.

"I will finally watch you walk out of here in orange clothes, chains and shackles," Ramirez told the defendants, "and know that you will never rob, assault, carjack and murder any one else ever again."

Alexander and Carrera are expected to soon be shipped out to prison. Brown will stay in Sacramento. He faces murder charges in the 2005 drug killing of Jorge Gonzalez.

The case is currently assigned to Department 26, Judge Michael A. Savage.

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