2 Suspects in Slaying of Boxer Surrender

The odds of making it as an Olympic boxer are mighty, but Cesar Cardenas, a young Wilmington man devoted to the sport and his family, dreamed of getting a crack at it.

“This kid was a very, very superb athlete, so I would say, yeah, he had an outside chance of it,” said Cardenas’ coach, Robert Lonergan. “. . . He was a very dedicated, determined athlete.”

Cardenas’ life came to a bloody end last May when three men and a teen-age boy broke into the small home in Wilmington that he shared with his mother, Maria, and his sister, Lourdes. The suspects robbed the family and killed Cardenas by shooting him twice in the head, according to Los Angeles Police Detective Richard Simmons. Lourdes Cardenas was wounded.

Police sought four suspects in the crimes, arresting a man and the teen-ager quickly. The other two surrendered Tuesday in Maryland, thanks in part to the television show “America’s Most Wanted,” as well as a campaign by Lonergan.

The fugitives, Michael Berry, 34, and Jessie Morrison, 22, walked into the Rockville, Md., Police Department and gave up at the urging of Morrison’s brother, authorities said.

Simmons said Los Angeles police had contacted the show about doing a segment on Cardenas’ murder. However, it wasn’t until Lonergan entered the picture that the show’s producers decided to do the piece, said Simmons and a spokesman for the show.

Lonergan said that several weeks after police contacted the show with no success, he wrote his own letter recounting Cardenas’ story.

Then, with the help of Lourdes, they began circulating petitions to send to the show’s producers. He went to the boxing community for signatures; she walked local neighborhoods.

“I just went to the gyms in Los Angeles and got all the fighters,” Lonergan said. “. . . There is a real camaraderie in this sport.”

Lonergan estimated that more than 400 signatures were sent to the producers, who answered within days that they would do a piece on the boxer.

“He wasn’t a gang kid, he was an all-American type of kid,” said Lonergan, who had coached Cardenas to 10 victories in 11 fights during the past two years.

“Then he was cut down like that.”

As Lonergan and police tell it, 22-year-old Cesar Cardenas was an ambitious man intent on making a success of himself, both as a boxer and a businessman. Besides training five or six times a week at a Torrance gym, he was taking business courses at a community college and trying to start a family printing business.

Lourdes Cardenas said that the family had moved from Carson to Wilmington about nine months before the crime. Her brother had set up the printing business in the garage while searching for a permanent location for it, she said.

“We were excited about getting the business going,” said Lourdes, a single mother who described her brother as a “straight arrow” who was “very cautious about never doing anything wrong.”

“It was going to be a family thing,” she said of the printing business. “. . . He had very high hopes for his family and his shop.”

Simmons said that the suspects knew the Cardenas family from its days in Carson. On the day of the crime, the four went to the Cardenas home asking to have a flyer printed for an upcoming picnic for gang members, he said. Police later determined no picnic was planned.

While they were at the Cardenas home, investigators allege one of the four stole a set of house keys from a living room table, Simmons said. They returned that night and entered the house, he said.

Lourdes said she was in bed with her 4-month-old girl, Natalee, when she first heard Cesar yell her name and then gunshots.

Natalee “was in my arms, and when I heard the shots go off, I turned and (to protect her) just threw her and she landed on the floor,” she said. Moments later Lourdes was wounded in the head and chest.

Although the baby and Maria Cardenas escaped injury, Lourdes spent two months in the hospital. She said $1,000 that she had stashed in her jewelry box to pay maternity bills was stolen.

Simmons said that Berry and Morrison were being sought by Los Angeles Police on charges of murder, attempted murder, robbery and burglary. They will be arraigned today in Maryland and are expected to waive extradition, he said.

Morrison was also being sought by police in Pascagoula, Miss. on a manslaughter charge stemming from a shooting in July, police said.

The alleged accomplices arrested earlier included Berry’s younger brother, Shawn, and a juvenile. Simmons said Shawn Berry was found guilty of residential burglary and sentenced to four years in state prison. The juvenile was sentenced to a term in the California Youth Authority.

Lourdes said that “a chill went through my body” when she learned the two suspects had surrendered.

“I was afraid that they might still be around or they might come back,” she said. “I was always looking over my shoulder.”

Said Lonergan, the father of an 11-year-old boy: “I would like my son to be just like Cesar when he grows up. He was a nice kid. It really hurt.”