Saved Once by Court, Killer Battles to Avoid Return to Death Row

“Say your prayers.”

With those three words, 21-year-old Marcelino Ramos put a rifle to the heads of two young Taco Bell workers during a robbery in Santa Ana eight years ago and pulled the trigger.

He killed one of them, 20-year-old Katherine Parrott--Brandy, her friends called her.

The co-worker, Kevin Pickrell, somehow survived.

When Ramos, who admitted the shooting, was sentenced and shipped to Death Row at San Quentin in 1980, he chastised the judge for not understanding the oppression of Latinos in the United States. He also vowed that “this is not the last time that the court will see me here.”

He was right. The state Supreme Court, on numerous grounds, set aside his death sentence in 1985 and ordered a new trial.

Ramos, now 30, returns to Orange County Superior Court on Wednesday. His re-trial is expected to ensue within a week.

Ramos is one of four Death Row inmates from Orange County whose sentences were set aside by the Supreme Court under then-Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird.

Two Already Re-sentenced

Two of the four--Rodney Alcala and Theodore Frank--have been sentenced again and are back on Death Row. The fourth, John Galen Davenport, is scheduled for trial in early 1988.

Ramos’ first-degree murder conviction was upheld by the Supreme Court. At the re-trial, the jury will decide only these issues: was the shooting intentional, and did it occur during the course of a robbery? And if so, should Ramos be sentenced to death or to life without parole?

Ramos’ attorney, Joel W. Baruch, knows that Ramos’ case is fraught with emotion because of his final words to his victims.

“It’s like rubbing their noses in it,” said one of the several Orange County prosecutors who have worked on the Ramos case. “ ‘You know I’m going to blow you away, so you’d better say your prayers.’ ”

But Baruch believes Ramos, who had never been arrested before this crime, has a good chance of escaping a death verdict this time.

For one thing, Baruch said, he believes he has an explanation for the “say your prayers” comment, although he refused to elaborate. Also, Baruch and his co-counsel, Deputy Public Defender Thomas J. Havlena, believe the key is to find jurors who can better understand Ramos and his childhood in a barrio.

Baruch and Havlena fought for more than a year to convince the court that Orange County’s jury rolls do not have an adequate Latino representation and Ramos therefore cannot get a fair trial here. But the courts disagreed.

Baruch says that if the jury panels called for Ramos’ trial don’t have enough Latinos, the defense will renew its challenge.

Many prosecutors insist that Latino jurors will be even more harsh with Ramos than non-Latinos, believing he has brought shame on the Latino community.

But Baruch disagrees.

“I’ll take 12 Mexican police officers if I can get them,” Baruch said. “You need Latinos on the jury to understand Ramos and what his life has been.”

Ramos was orphaned at birth. He and his brother, Mario Ybarro, were adopted by a poor couple in San Antonio, Texas. The father died when Ramos was five. The mother died when he was 15. He and Mario, two years older, were on their own after that.

‘Didn’t Join Gang’

“He didn’t join a gang,” Baruch said. “He didn’t get involved with drugs. He went out and scrounged around for bottles to make enough money to eat.”

Ramos also stayed close to Ruben Gaitan, a close friend since junior high school. In March, 1979, Ramos and Gaitan, his partner later in the Taco Bell killing, headed to California to live with another friend in Orange County.

Baruch claims that Ramos about that time “felt like he was going under.” No one was close to him--not even his brother, Mario. He had quit school after the eighth grade and had minimal skills. He apparently was struggling with the realization that he was gay, according to his writings, now in the court file.

On April, 14, 1979--less than two months before the killing--he wrote a letter to his brother. In that letter, now in court documents, Ramos said he would probably be dead soon.

“I know that you have never liked me as a brother. . . . but I was always proud to have a brother like you,” Ramos wrote. “After you have finished reading this letter, you could ask God to forgive me for what I did in my life.

“I know in the last years of my life we were far apart from each other, but to me, we were always together. I always wanted to make you proud of me, though everything I did came out wrong.”

Ramos added that he was trying his best to change his homosexual tendencies, but that it was hard for him.

Then, in a chilling statement in light of what happened later, Ramos wrote his brother: “I came here (to California) to change and make you proud of me.

‘Helped Me a Lot’

“Ruben (Gaitan) helped me a lot and changed me little by little. . . . Tell people that Ruben is your brother because I know that you always liked to have a brother like him.”

Gaitan found work doing odd jobs at a hotel.

Ramos went to work at Taco Bell. He quit a short time before the robbery.

Defense attorney Baruch says that on June 2, 1979, Ramos made out his will.

On June 3, 1979, according to Pickrell’s testimony, Gaitan came into the Taco Bell shortly before it was to close, about 12:50 a.m., and placed a huge order. Ramos came in separately. Pickrell said that when Ramos asked to see the work schedule, he told him to hop over the counter.

Pickrell then discovered that Ramos had a .22-caliber rifle under a jacket he was carrying. Pickrell said he laughed at first, but Ramos gave him a “serious, angry” look and told him it was no joke.

Pickrell and Parrott were the only two people in the restaurant with the robbers. Ramos ordered them into a walk-in refrigerator, Pickrell said. Ramos ordered Gaitan to take away an ax that was in the refrigerator. Then Ramos left the two victims while he went to the restaurant’s vault.

Pickrell said he told Parrott then that they were going to die. Ramos returned, he said, and told him to shut up.

He then ordered the victims to move to the back of the refrigerator and kneel, facing the back wall.

‘He Just Laughed’

Pickrell has testified that “I begged him not to kill us, but he just laughed.”

Ramos then told them to take off their Taco Bell hats. He told them to lean their heads forward, and he told Parrott to put a piece of cloth in her mouth. Then he told them to say their prayers.

“That’s as cold-blooded as you can get,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Bryan F. Brown said at Ramos’ and Gaitan’s preliminary hearing.

Pickrell does not remember the shots. He does remember that Ramos apparently struck each of them in the head with something first, and medical evidence supports that.

Superior Court Judge Richard J. Beacom, who sentenced Ramos to death, noted psychologists’ reports that he was borderline mentally retarded in school. He also noted that Ramos came from “a very impoverished background.”

But Beacom added that, in the United States, even people with that background have a chance of upward mobility.

The Supreme Court reversed Ramos’ death sentence mainly on the grounds that Beacom failed to instruct the jury that it had to find that Ramos intended to kill Brandy Parrott. Prosecutors called the Bird court decision ludicrous.

Can Baruch and Havlena produce a result different from Ramos’ first trial?

Baruch says it will be tough on him if Ramos receives a second death verdict.

‘Does Not Deserve Death’

“Marcelino Ramos has become my friend; I like him very much,” Baruch said. “This man does not deserve the death penalty for this crime.”

But he also says his job won’t be easy.

“A Latino man killing a young white woman? With an Orange County jury? When the victim is a young white woman, a lot of defendants end up on Death Row no matter what their race is,” Baruch said.

But if Ramos does escape a death sentence, Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. James G. Enright said, “It will be a great injustice. This case should never have been brought back.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Patrick S. Geary, who will prosecute Ramos, said he is concerned that Pickrell, who already has told his story to the courts and police numerous times, will have to relive it for a jury again.

“He thinks the system must be screwed up to put him through this again,” Geary said. “I don’t blame him.”