Salcido Jury Urges Death for 7 Killings : Trial: Panel says killer acted in a ‘cold-hearted’ manner and showed no remorse for the wine-country rampage.

Nineteen months after Ramon Salcido slashed his wife and two of their daughters to death in a wine-country rampage that claimed seven lives, a jury Friday said he should die in the gas chamber.

Salcido, 29, reacted with the same faraway stare he wore throughout most the trial, as a Spanish interpreter translated the jury’s decision.

“He doesn’t know where he is,” defense attorney Marteen Miller said. “He’s not insane, but he’s a little goofy.”

Salcido’s aloof demeanor and his lack of remorse before or during the trial, jurors said, played a significant role in their decision to give him the death penalty instead of life in prison without parole.

His attorneys claimed that cocaine, alcohol and jealousy triggered Salcido’s murder rampage, in which he killed his wife, two young daughters, his mother-in-law, two sisters-in-law and his boss. Another daughter, 2-year-old Carmina, survived after he slit her throat and dumped her in a ravine with her sisters.

“I was expecting a mad-dog killer and I didn’t see that,” jury foreman John Williams, 36, a medical researcher from Portola Valley, said of his first reaction to Salcido. “I saw him then as a deer caught in the headlights, an almost pathetic man who may have gone crazy for a while.

“But in going over the evidence, I decided this was not the case,” Williams said. “His crime fit his personality. He did it in a cold-hearted way, and he deserved the death penalty.”

Sonoma County prosecutor Peter Bumerts described Salcido as “fairly cold and calculating, more like a fox than a mad dog.”

Superior Court Judge Reginald Littrell, on assignment from Sierra County, set formal sentencing for Dec. 17.

An appeal to the state Supreme Court is automatic in California death penalty cases.

The jury received the penalty phase of the case Tuesday afternoon. The same panel on Oct. 30 found Salcido guilty of six counts of first-degree murder, one count of second-degree murder and two counts of attempted murder.

Salcido was convicted of shooting or slashing to death his wife, Angela; his 4-year-old and 22-month-old daughters, Sofia and Teresa; his mother-in-law, Marion Richards; her 12-year-old and 8-year-old daughters, Ruth and Maria; and Tracey Toovey, 35, the wine master at Grand Cru winery in Glen Ellen.

The jury also convicted Salcido of attempting to murder his daughter Carmina and Kenneth Butti, his supervisor at the winery.