Carlsbad

The search for a suspect in the slaying of a Carlsbad engineer was bolstered Tuesday when the district attorney’s office announced that a special assistant was being assigned to the case.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Philip Walden, who supervises the D.A.’s North County office, said that Ernie Halcon, a former U.S. Justice Department employee, has joined the effort to locate Antonio Lopez Yescas, a farm worker from Oaxaca, Mexico, who is the key suspect in the September shooting of Greg Nakatani.

Halcon was assigned to assist the district attorney’s criminal investigator, Augustin de la Rosa, because he has experience in dealing with law enforcement agencies in Mexico, one of several locations where Yescas may have fled, Walden said.

In a related development Tuesday, Ildefonso Perez Martinez pleaded innocent in North County Superior Court to charges that he was an accessory to murder in the case. Martinez, a 25-year-old Mexican national, is being held in the Vista County Jail on $2,000 bail.

Nakatani, a 23-year-old mechanical engineer at General Dynamics, was shot and killed Sept. 20 after an altercation with two men outside a Leucadia taco shop. Nakatani’s slaying has attracted attention because his parents contend the case has been mishandled by the Sheriff’s Department and the district attorney.

The Nakatanis met last week with Dist. Atty. Edwin Miller to discuss their concerns, and prosecutors assigned a criminal investigator to the case after receiving inquiries from Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.) and Rep. Norm Mineta (D-San Jose).