14-Year-Old Snipers Convicted of Murder

Two 14-year-old Pacoima boys were convicted Wednesday of second-degree murder in the April sniper attack that killed a delivery-truck driver as he was unhitching a trailer.

Sylmar Juvenile Court Judge Morton Rochman also found one of the boys guilty of assault with a deadly weapon in a separate incident that occurred a day earlier. In that shooting, the youth fired a rifle into a Rapid Transit District bus, wounding a 13-year-old girl who was hit by shattered glass.

Rothman said he considered one boy’s mother to be “morally culpable” for the crimes because she left her son and his friend alone in her apartment with guns.

Tears streamed down the face of one boy as the judge read the verdict, said Deputy Public Defender Albert M. Meister.

The youth who actually fired the shot that killed Mark Rodney Sanford, 26, of La Crescenta as he worked at the Familian Pipe & Supply Co. plant on Van Nuys Boulevard, faces a sentence of 17 years to life, Deputy Dist. Atty. Jerry J. Bowes said. He is scheduled to be sentenced July 22.

The other boy, who was convicted of firing at the bus in addition to the murder charge, faces a possible sentence of 22 years to life, Bowes said. He is scheduled to be sentenced July 29.

Bowes said it is probable that the two boys will be turned over to the California Youth Authority, which can hold them until they are 25 years old, then must release them.

During the trial, Meister had argued that the boy who shot Sanford was aiming from the second-floor window of the other boy’s apartment at wooden pallets in the pipe company yard, not at the victim. However, in statements made to police, the boy said he aimed at the man, Meister said.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Janice L. Maurizi said the boy spent two minutes aiming the rifle and killed Sanford “just for the sport of it.”

The boys are “a study in opposites,” with one being brought up in a strict Pentecostal home and the other “a latchkey kid,” Meister said.

“When his friend showed him the gun, it was like Disneyland,” Meister said.