From Andy Furillo:
On Friday, a Sacramento Superior Court jury convicted Jorge Padilla Ruiz (top photo) of two murders he committed two years ago in North Sacramento in a case that prosecutors said was motivated solely by racial hatred.
Deputy District Attorney Dawn Bladet told jurors in her closing argument that Ruiz, 30, shot and killed Roosevelt June Campbell (above left photo) and Lonnie Lee Taylor (above right photo), both of whom were 40-year-old African Americans, "because of their race, because of their color, because of their ethnicity."
Ruiz was angry, Bladet said, because the defendant's brother, Ricardo, had been pummeled an hour before the 4 a.m. murders on April 23, 2006, in a fight that pitted a group of Latino men against a gathering of young African Americans.
Upset over the beating, Ruiz armed himself with a 9mm handgun and took to the streets in a relative's sports utility vehicle. He came across Campbell and Taylor, who had nothing to do with his brother's beating, at the Shell station on Del Paso Boulevard and El Camino Avenue, a popular hangout for street people on the city's north side. It's located two miles from the site of the earlier fight at the 7-Eleven on Northgate Boulevard.
"His motivation wasn't to get the people who hurt his brother, but to strike out against a group of people who represented the people who beat down his brother," Bladet said in her closing argument Tuesday.
Ruiz pulled up towards the gas station, turned off his car lights, pointed his gun, fired four times and killed his victims, the jury found.
Ruiz' conviction carries three special circumstance allegations - multiple murders, racially motivated murders and shooting and discharging a firearm from a motor vehicle.
He faces a life term without possibility of parole at his Oct. 17 sentencing.
Ruiz' lawyer, Jesse Ortiz, described his client as a laborer with a wife and two children. Ortiz said Ruiz went to Mexico the night after the shooting to visit a sick sister.
The defense lawyer argued to the jury that Campbell and Taylor were murdered as a result of a drug ripoff that had taken place earlier at the notorious "Compound," the drug-ridden apartment complex on Dixieanne Avenue, around the corner from the Shell station.
The defense lawyer said there was no physical evidence to link Ruiz to the murders. He argued that his theory of the murders, which was based on testimony from neighborhood denizens questioned by police in the wake of the shootings, had enough credence to raise a reasonable doubt about the prosecution's case.
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