Life or death? Fate in jury's hands for man convicted of murdering 4 people in Palm Springs
A jury will begin deciding Friday whether the man convicted of killing four people in Palm Springs will be sentenced to death or serve life in prison.
A prosecutor and defense attorney delivered their closing arguments Thursday in the penalty phase of Jose Larin-Garcia's trial. Jurors will begin deliberations at 11 a.m. Friday.
Larin-Garcia's fate will ultimately be in the hands of Riverside County Superior Court Judge Anthony Villalobos. But judges rarely depart from a jury's recommendation in capital cases, and Villalobos has upheld a death sentence in the past.
Larin-Garcia, 23, was convicted as charged earlier this month of four homicides including two special circumstances that made him eligible for the death penalty: that he lay in wait to commit the murders and that he killed multiple people.
The death sentence comes four years and two trials after the four were fatally shot.
“Jose Vladimir Larin-Garcia, on February 3, 2019, executed four people. For no reason. He deserves the greater punishment of death,” Deputy District Attorney Samantha Paixao told the jury Thursday.
Urging jurors to spare Larin-Garcia's life, defense attorney John Dolan pointed to evidence another man was the real shooter.
Saying a mistaken guilty verdict and life sentence could be undone if Larin-Garcia is only sent to prison, Dolan added: “This mistake, however, is extraordinarily difficult, because if you make a mistake and you vote for death for Jose Larin-Garcia, and he's executed and then we find out he's not the third person in the back of the car — what do we do about that? What does anybody do about that?”
On the night of the killings, Palm Springs police officers were dispatched to a report of shots fired just before midnight on the 3700 block of East Sunny Dunes Road. There they found a green Toyota Camry crashed into a brick wall in front of a residence. Inside were the bodies of Yuliana Garcia, 17; Jacob Montgomery, 19; and Juan Duarte Raya, 18. Several blocks away the body of Carlos Campos Rivera, 25, was found prone on Canon Drive. All had been fatally shot.
Text message evidence and eyewitness testimony showed Larin-Garcia and the three found in the car had travelled to Canon Drive to sell Campos Rivera pills.
Paixao has argued the botched drug deal ended with Larin-Garcia shooting Campos Rivera and the other three as they sped away. On Thursday, she described Larin-Garcia’s decisions four years ago as “calculated” and “deliberate.”
Dolan has argued the shooter was a fifth person in the car who successfully evaded police and remains at large. One police officer reported seeing a person fleeing the area, but they were never found.
Officers found Larin-Garcia hiding under a truck a couple blocks from where the car crashed. He had removed blood-spattered clothing and was taken to Desert Regional Medical Center, where he was treated for a laceration on his arm. A couple hours later, the hospital's security cameras captured him fleeing the facility wearing a hospital gown and without being released by a doctor.
He walked to the Palm Springs home of a friend, Joseph Beaver, who helped him gather belongings and a cell phone from his mother and purchased him a bus ticket to Florida under a fake name. Larin-Garcia was arrested at a bus station in Indio soon before his bus was scheduled to depart.
Larin-Garcia's attorneys focused their defense on several open questions unanswered by the investigation, such as who was the person seen fleeing the scene and where was the murder weapon, which was never found. Dolan argued that the shooter was an acquaintance of the group, John Olvera, who attempted in the days following to take credit for the killings on social media. Olvera later recanted the statements to police and during testimony.
But those open questions were among the issues that led to the first jury announcing they couldn't agree on a verdict. After testimony spanning 2021 and 2022, Villalobos declared a mistrial in March 2022.
Larin-Garcia's second trial began in September, and both sides provided their closing statements earlier this month in the first phase of the trial, where guilt or innocence was determined.
The second trial also saw the discovery of evidence thought to have been lost by a Palm Springs police evidence clerk. A bag containing glass, a bullet casing and a cigarette butt was found in the trunk of the crashed car, which the police department had stored for the investigation. The defense requested a mistrial after the evidence was found, but Villalobos denied the motion and barred the jury from hearing about the rediscovered evidence.
The jury returned a guilty verdict after only a couple hours of deliberations on Feb. 6.
Riverside County has sentenced five people to death between 2018 and 2022, tying Cuyahoga County, Ohio, for the most during that timeframe of any county in the nation.
California has not executed a prisoner since 2006, but 669 prisoners are now on death row, including 88 from Riverside County.
This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Jury in Palm Springs quadruple homicide now considering death penalty