County’s Most Violent Gang-Related Shooting in Hands of Twin Juries : Trial: Defendants didn’t care that 4-year-old was killed, prosecutor says in closing argument. ‘They wanted to get everybody.’

A 4-year-old boy was killed in the La Bonita Avenue shootings last September because the three defendants from the 5th Street gang didn’t care whom they killed in an escalation of gang warfare in Orange County, a prosecutor told jurors this week.

“It made no difference to them,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Thomas Avdeef. “They wanted to get everybody and they wanted to make an impression--that they were macho.”

Avdeef, who completed his closing arguments Tuesday in a unique two-jury trial, argued that the county’s worst shootings were a pay-back because a nephew of Louis P. Valadez, 28, one of the defendants, had been killed in an earlier gang incident.

On trial with Valadez are Robert P. Figueroa, 20, and Roman G. Menchaca, 19. They are charged with the murders of Frankie Fernandez Jr., the little boy, and Miguel (Smokey) Navarro, 18, and the attempted murders of six other people who were wounded in the Sept. 16, 1989, shooting.

Witnesses said that as a pickup truck moved slowly down the street just after dark, two young men in the back began firing at random toward the people on the sidewalk and in cars in the 13000 block of La Bonita Avenue, just north of Westminster Avenue in Garden Grove. The La Bonita address is considered turf for the 17th Street gang, a longtime rival of 5th Street’s.

Three young women who dodged bullets that night identified the three defendants and a juvenile, who is in custody and will be tried separately, as the assailants. The three women said they broke the gang code of silence and agreed to testify because of the little boy’s death. Two of the women were his cousins.

Several other victims said they could not identify the assailants but could identify the truck--a red pickup with a unique rack of amber lights on the cab. Avdeef introduced evidence that Valadez owned a truck like the one identified.

Valadez was identified by one of the three young women as the driver; Figueroa by two of them as a passenger in the cab. All of them identified Menchaca as one of the two shooters riding in the back of the pickup.

But the three defense lawyers hammered away at inconsistencies in the women’s versions about what happened, calling them all liars. One lawyer argued that the three women only assumed it was Valadez and his two friends because they thought they recognized the truck.

One of the young women said she saw Figueroa before the shooting began, then later said it was afterward, when the truck had passed. Figueroa’s attorney, Julian W. Bailey, argued to the jurors Monday that “Superman couldn’t have identified anybody in that truck” because the cab’s back glass was black. All the defense lawyers argued it was too dark and the witnesses were all too busy dodging a hail of bullets for them to see anything.

Valadez’s attorney, David Zimmerman, argued that it was nonsense to believe Valadez would have used his own truck, with its unique front, if he were going to be involved in the shooting. Zimmerman asked his client to stand up.

“Does Louis look naive? Does Louis look dumb to you?” Zimmerman asked the jurors.

Superior Court Judge Tully H. Seymour ordered two juries to hear the trial--a unique situation in Orange County, but already done elsewhere in California--because of a last-minute decision to include Menchaca as a defendant. He was about to be granted a separate trial because his attorney, C. Thomas McDonald, had a scheduling conflict. When that was resolved, Seymour ordered a second jury to hear the trial and decide only on Menchaca’s case.

The two juries sat in on the trial together until the end. A split in strategy between McDonald and the other two defense attorneys led the Menchaca jury to hear evidence the other lawyers didn’t want their jury to hear.

McDonald boldly announced to jurors he would name the real killers, and put on evidence to show that a nephew of Valadez’s and two of his friends had Valadez’s truck that night. Valadez’s attorney didn’t want his jurors to hear that because that would be a tacit admission that his client’s truck was indeed involved in the shooting.