Youth Prays With Family After Going Free in Killing

Carlos Alberto Tirado, cleared Monday by a Superior Court judge in the murder of his former girlfriend, spent part of Tuesday in church with his family, praying.

“I knew I was innocent,” a somber and dispassionate Tirado said in an interview at his home. “For my family, it was worse.”

Tirado, now 17, was released three days into his trial in Santa Ana for the 1985 Memorial Day hatchet murder of Norma Isela Ramirez, 14. Orange County Superior Court Judge Donald A. McCartin ruled that the prosecution evidence was circumstantial and insufficient to prove the youth’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Tirado was being tried as a juvenile because he was 15 at the time of the slaying. Arrested at Santa Ana High School on May 12, nearly two years after the slaying, he had been held until Monday in Orange County Juvenile Hall.

The suspicion of murder that lingered over Tirado for two years has left his family bitter about the police and relatives of the victim, who maintained throughout the period between the killing and his arrest that Tirado was guilty.

“In our family we loved her (Ramirez),” said one of Tirado’s sisters, Angie, 22. “But she went to heaven and left hell behind for us.”

At Santa Ana High, where Tirado was a sophomore when he was arrested, Principal Gerald Arriola said students were divided on the question of whether “justice prevailed.”

But there was a sense of relief, he said, that it was over.

Mia Camacho, 17, who described herself as an acquaintance of Tirado’s, said: “He was always quiet and never bothered anyone. He must feel awful, having people talking about him, saying ‘you did it, you did it.’ It’s none of everyone’s business.”

“I never found out about that talk,” Carlos Tirado said Tuesday, sitting on the sofa at the house he shares with his three sisters, mother and grandmother. “And I never spoke to people about it.”

Still, he said he doesn’t plan to return to Santa Ana High next fall.

According to trial testimony, Tirado had sex with Ramirez in his grandmother’s camper on the night of May 26. He then tried to get Ramirez to have sex with his cousin. When she refused, Tirado pushed her and told her to walk home alone.

Later that same night Ramirez received either two or three phone calls at home, at least one of those from Tirado. Shortly afterward, she slipped out of the house unnoticed by her family.

Her body, severely mutilated with a hatchet, was found early the next morning. She was not identified until three days later, when investigators saw a picture of her in her uncle’s Spanish-language newspaper, El Sol Latino.

The prosecution contended that Tirado killed Ramirez in anger because he wanted to go out with one of her girlfriends.

Tirado said Tuesday he wants to become a professional body builder like his hero, Arnold Schwarzenegger. By working out three hours a day, six days a week, Tirado said, “I hope I have a body like his.”

He took up body building after Ramirez’s death, he said, as a way to escape from the case.

“Every day seemed like an eternity,” said Guadalupe Rosales, Tirado’s mother. “I know, and God knows, he was innocent.”