Man Gets 27 Years to Life in Death of Ex-Girlfriend

A South-Central Los Angeles man was sentenced Wednesday to the maximum term of 27 years to life in prison for fatally shooting his ex-girlfriend, a nurse who came to his aid as he was lying in a Studio City street feigning illness.

San Fernando Superior Court Judge John H. Major handed down the sentence for Giles Aubery, 54, after six relatives of the victim, Lucille Marie Warren, pleaded that he be sentenced to death or receive a life sentence without the possibility of parole.

But Major said he could do neither because he did not find Aubery guilty of a “special circumstance,” such as lying in wait, that could have warranted the death penalty. Major said the lying-in-wait circumstance, which prosecutors had alleged against Aubery, did not apply because the man was not hiding before he shot the nurse.

“My sister was a nurse. She was a Christian lady,” Penny Hudson-Lindsey of Moreno Valley told Major. “She did something good for this community. She took the Hippocratic oath. When she sees someone lying in the street, it’s in her nature to help them.”

After a non-jury trial April 4, Major convicted Aubery of murdering Warren, 40, of Inglewood on Feb. 22, 1989.

Warren had just left a house where she had been caring for a patient when she stopped her car to help a man lying in the middle of the street in the 7400 block of Woodrow Wilson Drive near Mulholland Drive, police said. The nurse apparently recognized Aubery and started to run away when he fired three shots at her. She died four hours later at a hospital.

Aubery, a former probation officer, apparently had become jealous after a recent breakup with Warren, police said. He was arrested after a car, which witnesses said the gunman used to escape after the shooting, was traced to him.

Warren’s two children said in court Wednesday that they remained traumatized by the killing and that their grades suffered after they moved from Los Angeles to Vallejo to live with their mother’s ex-husband.

“That man over here killed my mother for no reason,” Warren’s son, Kareem Warren, 16, said as he looked at Aubery. “I don’t think it’s right. I think he should get the death penalty or life without the possibility of parole.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Edwin F. Greene, who prosecuted Aubery, said Aubery probably will not be eligible for parole until 2010.