The bullet that killed 6-year-old Aiden Leos punched a small gap within the trunk of his mom’s silver Chevrolet, a number of inches from the license plate.
The spherical traveled by way of the automotive’s again seat, by way of his booster seat and into the kid’s again, passing by way of his liver, lung and coronary heart. He was already lifeless, minutes later, when an off-duty police officer discovered him bleeding on the aspect of the 55 Freeway close to his screaming mom and tried to revive him.
When investigators caught as much as 24-year-old Marcus Eriz after an intensive 16-day manhunt, he mentioned that the Chevrolet’s driver, Aiden’s mom, had flipped him off in visitors. However he in any other case supplied scant perception as to why he took maintain of his 9-millimeter semiautomatic gun and fired right into a stranger’s automotive that morning in Could 2021.
“I simply grabbed my gun for some cause … shot at them,” Eriz advised an interrogator, in keeping with a transcript offered in Orange County Superior Courtroom on Thursday, the place Eriz is on trial going through fees of second-degree homicide and taking pictures at a motorized vehicle.
“This isn’t a highway rage case,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Daniel Feldman advised jurors in his opening assertion, however reasonably concerning the defendant’s “callous and complete disregard for human life.”
Eriz had been a passenger in his girlfriend Wynne Lee’s Volkswagen at rush hour on the morning of Could 21. They had been on the 55 Freeway close to Chapman Avenue and headed north to Riverside County, the place they labored collectively at a collision-repair store.
Joanna Cloonan had strapped her son Aiden into his booster seat and was driving him to kindergarten on the identical stretch of freeway. He had simply turned 6. By Cloonan’s account, the Volkswagen minimize her off within the carpool lane, forcing her to hit her brakes, and its driver, Lee, flashed a peace signal she interpreted as sarcastic.
Cloonan adopted the Volkswagen for a brief distance, then modified lanes to move and prolonged her center finger on the different automotive, “one thing she would come to remorse past comprehension,” the prosecutor advised jurors.
As Cloonan pulled away, she heard a sound like a rock hitting her automotive and her son cry out in ache. She pulled to the aspect of the freeway and unstrapped him. “Please assist,” she repeated frantically to a 911 dispatcher. “He’s bleeding to demise. … I’m on the freeway.”
An off-duty Seal Seashore police officer, Joe Garcia, noticed the commotion and pulled over to assist. He carried out CPR and carried the boy to the ambulance that transported him to Kids’s Hospital of Orange County, however the boy was pronounced lifeless throughout the hour.
A motorist witnessed a part of the incident and managed to snap a blurry photograph of the Volkswagen because it pulled away, which gave investigators a spotlight as they launched an enormous manhunt. There was a conspicuous memorial on the taking pictures web site, posters that mentioned “Who shot Aiden?” hung up and down the freeway, and by early June the reward had climbed to $450,000.
Round that point, when a co-worker advised Eriz that his girlfriend’s Volkswagen resembled the automotive police had been searching for, he parked the automotive at his household’s home in Whittier and started driving to work in his truck. He and Lee, who was 23, had been taken into custody at their dwelling in Costa Mesa days later.
The taking pictures resulted from “a momentary lapse of cause by a 24-year-old man who had little or no life expertise,” Deputy Public Defender Randall Bethune advised jurors Thursday.
“The person who confesses was conscious of the implications,” he mentioned, however “the person who pulled the set off” was not. After the taking pictures, Eriz’s girlfriend requested why he’d performed it. “He didn’t have a great reply as to why he did what he did, proper then,” Bethune mentioned. “He simply didn’t have a solution.”
Eriz went to work unaware that he had killed the boy, the protection legal professional mentioned, describing him as “a 24-year-old man who likes to play video video games and watch YouTube” reasonably than observe the information, which left him in the dead of night for days about what he’d performed.
When he came upon, the protection legal professional mentioned, he didn’t flip himself in as a result of he was “frozen with concern,” although he didn’t eliminate the gun or flee the realm.
“He’s not a monster,” Bethune advised jurors. “He’s only a younger man who made a mistake.”
The trial continues within the Santa Ana courtroom of Superior Courtroom Decide Richard King. Lee, who faces a felony cost of accent after the very fact to the crime, is scheduled to be tried individually.