Accomplice in Killing of Migrants Pleads Guilty

On the eve of his murder trial, a 20-year-old San Diego man pleaded guilty Thursday to two counts of voluntary manslaughter in the hate-crime slayings of two unarmed Mexican migrants.

Dennis Bencivenga, a one-time security guard and convenience store clerk from Rancho Bernardo, entered his plea before San Diego Superior Court Judge William Mudd, who remanded him to County Jail.

In a plea bargain, Bencivenga could be sentenced to a maximum of 14 years in state prison and ordered to pay a $20,000 fine.

Authorities have said the two victims, shot down along an isolated San Diego roadside on the evening of Nov. 9, 1988, were killed solely because they were Latino. Their bodies were riddled with 11 rounds from a semiautomatic rifle.

The triggerman in the slayings, Kenneth Kovzelove, 18, also of San Diego, pleaded guilty in October to two counts of first-degree murder. Judge Mudd, calling Kovzelove a “cold-blooded killer,” later sentenced him to 50 years to life in state prison and ordered him to pay a $20,000 fine.

Mudd scheduled sentencing for Bencivenga on May 4.

The case has received extensive publicity in Mexico, where it has fed a widespread perception of abuse of expatriate workers in the United States.

Bencivenga, like Kovzelove, could have also faced up to life in prison on the original murder charges. But authorities agreed to the lesser manslaughter charges, weighing Bencivenga’s critical cooperation with investigators, his expressions of remorse, and the fact that he was the driver of the vehicle involved in the slaying, not the actual murderer.

Bencivenga, apparently remorseful, admitted his involvement in January, 1989, to an Army recruiter, who notified police. The case had previously stumped investigators. Bencivenga then cooperated with investigators.

The two friends were arrested in March, 1989. Kovzelove was apprehended at Ft. Benning, Ga., where he was training as a paratrooper--a job he sought because it would afford him the opportunity to kill legally, according to prosecutors.

“We all felt from the beginning that if he (Bencivenga) had not come forward, Kovzelove would have killed somebody else,” said A. David Stutz, the deputy district attorney who prosecuted the case, in a telephone interview Thursday. “When it came down to it, I don’t think Bencivenga would have pulled the trigger. Kovzelove did, and would have done it again. . . . He was the psychopathic killer.”

In statements to police, authorities say that Kovzelove--a fair-haired, slightly built teen-ager whose physical appearance contrasts with that of the husky, dark-haired Bencivenga--admitted firing on the two unarmed men. Kovzelove acknowledged that he shouted “Kill!” “Kill!” as he shot at the men, police say, and that he later felt exhilarated by the experience.

In his statements to police, Bencivenga acknowledged that he was driving on the night of the killings, and that he had furnished the South Korean-made assault rifle. Authorities say Kovzelove, crouching and wearing military fatigues, fired from the bed of a pickup stopped along semirural Black Mountain Road, near San Diego’s northern city limits, in an area frequented by migrant workers.

Before and after the killings, Stutz said, the two men scouted the San Diego area in search of other Latino targets. Kovzelove has admitted a hatred for Mexicans, whom he accuses of taking jobs from U. S. citizens and whom he resents for not speaking English, Stutz said.

“There is no doubt in my mind that, if there had been five men along Black Mountain Road that night, Kovzelove would have killed all of them,” said Stutz, who added that the triggerman suffers from a “classic Rambo syndrome.”

Kovzelove was 17 at the time of the murders but was tried as an adult by a Juvenile Court judge.

Mudd has the option of sending Bencivenga to the California Youth Authority until age 25, then to an adult prison to finish the sentence.

On Thursday, Bencivenga hugged his mother and other friends and relatives before entering court to plead guilty. Bencivenga’s mother told her son, “God bless you.”

Bencivenga’s bail was revoked after his guilty plea. Bencivenga will probably serve at least half of the maximum 14-year prison term before qualifying for parole, prosecutors said.

The victims--Hilario Castaneda Salgado, 22, a native of the Mexican state of Guerrero, and Matilde Macedo de la Sancha, 19, a native of the state of Mexico--were homeless farm workers who occasionally lived in the brush near the site where they were gunned down.

Through Michael D. Padilla, a San Diego attorney, the victims’ families filed civil wrongful death claims against the two killers, but the claims were dismissed when it was learned that neither assailant had any financial holdings, said a spokeswoman for Padilla.