Jury Urged to Convict 4 in Girl’s Slaying

In a voice choked with emotion, a Los Angeles County prosecutor Tuesday urged a Superior Court jury to convict four gang members of the 1995 murder of 3-year-old Stephanie Kuhen during an early morning ambush of a vehicle that ventured onto a dimly lit, dead-end street in Cypress Park.

Recalling how the drive home from a family outing turned into a tragedy, Deputy Dist. Atty. Eleanor Hunter argued that the attack on Stephanie and her family occurred only because they had innocently ventured onto a narrow block that a street gang called the Assassins viewed as its domain.

“These people are not on trial because they are gang members. They are on trial because they are murderers. Each and every one of them,” Hunter told the jury as closing arguments began in the trial of Anthony Gabriel Rodriguez, 28, Manuel Rosales Jr., 22, and Hugo David Gomez and Augustin Lizama, both 17.

Defense attorneys, urging jurors to take a dispassionate look at the facts, countered that their clients face possible life prison terms based on a dearth of physical evidence and questionable eyewitness testimony including that of a former gang member who was granted immunity in the shooting.

Indeed, said attorney Paul Catalano, the defendants are on trial because of their gang affiliation.

“I don’t want you to like him,” Catalano said of his client, Rosales. “I don’t want you to feel sorry for him. Yes, he’s chosen the gang lifestyle. And yes, he’s an idiot for it.”

But, the defense attorney said, “that doesn’t make him guilty of a crime.”

All four defendants have pleaded not guilty to the slaying of Stephanie and the attempted murder of five others--including her mother--in a Sept. 17, 1995, ambush that became known as the “wrong way” attack because it occurred when, the group said, it accidentally turned down the wrong street on the way home from a birthday party.

While that mistake may have passed without consequences in most neighborhoods, Hunter told the jury, it proved fatal for Stephanie because a group of young “gangsters” viewed the unknown vehicle traveling down their street as a sign of disrespect.

“To these four gang members, disrespect means everything,” Hunter said. “How dare these people come into their alley,” she added, mocking the gang members.

“And how did they choose to respond? They responded with violence, with guns and ultimately, with death,” she said.

Noting how the family’s car came under a fusillade of bullets, Hunter added: “But for the grace of God . . . six people would have died . . . and if it was up to these little thugs, six people would have died.”

Were it not for the survival of those in the car, solid detective work and the courage of several people who testified, Hunter said, the four defendants might have escaped arrest.

With that, Hunter outlined the thrust of the prosecution’s case including the pivotal testimony of former gang member Marvin Pech, who was granted immunity from prosecution.

Acknowledging Pech’s own history as a gang member, Hunter noted, “There is an old saying: If a play is cast in hell, don’t expect the players to be angels.”

In that vein, she urged jurors to set aside their views of Pech’s background to instead focus on how his testimony corroborated physical evidence linking the defendants to the shooting.

Coupled with the testimony of others including the car’s driver, Hunter said, there was more than ample proof that Lizama moved a trash can into the middle of the street to block the car’s exit before Rodriguez, Rosales and Gomez opened fire with handguns as the vehicle sped away.

“When you look at what happened out there . . . you think about how many lives it destroyed,” said Hunter, who later in a halting voice described how Kuhen’s mother desperately tried to stop her daughter’s bleeding from a bullet wound to the head.

Beginning their own closing remarks, defense attorneys pleaded with jurors to put aside the obvious emotions of the tragedy to look clearly at the evidence in the case.

“The emotion and the passion and the feelings are not in favor of Anthony Rodriguez,” conceded James Sussman, his attorney.

But Sussman said the case against Rodriguez was almost nonexistent: a beer can with Rodriguez’s fingerprints found at the scene of a party on the street that night and a .45-caliber ammunition magazine that was damaged to the point where a ballistics expert called by the defense said it could not be linked to the gun in the ambush.

Sussman also asked jurors to consider a factor that defense attorneys have mentioned throughout the three-week trial: that whoever fired at the vehicle believed it might be carrying rival gang members.

“Do you think anybody in the alley is going to shoot at a car with three children?” Sussman asked the jurors.

Later, Rosales’ attorney, Catalano, echoed Sussman’s challenge to the physical evidence in the case as well as the testimony of Pech.

Like Sussman, Catalano also asked jurors to objectively review the facts and not be swayed by their disdain for gang members like his client.