OXNARD : Transsexual’s Killer Gets Prison Term

An Oxnard man who shot and killed a transsexual three years ago for dancing with his brother was sentenced Thursday to 17 years to life in prison.

Howard J. Asher, a public defender representing Daniel Montenegro Delgado, 24, said he would appeal the case, adding that the second-degree murder verdict handed down by a jury last month was unfair because of cultural differences.

Delgado was convicted of firing six rounds point-blank into Rosando Sanchez-Reyes, a preoperative transsexual who called himself Crystal. The jury acquitted Delgado of first-degree murder because, as one juror put it, he was “not quite rational” on Christmas night, 1987, when he shot Sanchez-Reyes at El Bohemio, a bar in Oxnard.

After the sentence was announced, Delgado told Superior Court Judge Lawrence Storch that even though the jury included three Latinos, it was not reflective of his cultural background.

“I was raised a Mexican,” Delgado said as his family members looked on. “I speak Spanish, the jury doesn’t. They are rich, I am poor. They are Anglos and I am Mexican. Since Pancho Villa, we have not understood each other.”

Although the jurors believed that Delgado was not rational enough to have premeditated the slaying, they said he did not deserve a lesser conviction of manslaughter because he was conscious of his actions during the shooting.

Asher said Thursday that a Latino-dominated jury would have better understood the anger that pushed Delgado to kill Sanchez-Reyes after he saw him dancing with his brother, Loreno Montenegro. During the trial, attorneys argued that Delgado has a great deal of pride in his family and was insulted to find a man that he knew was homosexual with his brother.

“If he had a jury that understood his background and hatred . . . there would be a different verdict,” Asher said. “Your average Ventura County jury has a hard time with that.”