Man Guilty in Car Deaths of Newly Engaged Couple

A 25-year-old Garden Grove man was found guilty Tuesday of vehicular manslaughter and hit-and-run drunk driving in the deaths of a newly engaged Long Beach couple.

On Sept. 3, 1990, Alberto Ochoa’s 1987 Ford Bronco collided with the rear of a Honda Prelude, knocking it off the freeway, down an embankment and into a tree.

The driver of the Honda, Kevin Presley, 30, was killed instantly. His fiancee, Julie Daniel, was critically injured and died four days later, just before her 29th birthday.

A blood test found Ochoa’s blood-alcohol level to be 0.12, well over the legal limit of 0.08. He faces up to 12 years in prison when he is sentenced on June 7.

Tuesday’s verdict in Orange County Superior Court was greeted with tears from both the victims’ families and jurors. Daniel’s father Ron, a professor at Cal Poly Pomona, said the two days of testimony were extremely trying.

“The most difficult thing is to hear ‘Julie was killed,’ to hear those words,” he said from his Brea home. “It’s very difficult to listen to the testimony and realize it was such a stupid, ridiculous thing that happened, that here were two kids on the way to their future who just suddenly had their futures taken away from them and our hopes taken away from us.”

Daniel, 54, said his daughter worked her way through college as a communications major at Cal State Fullerton and then went on to earn certification as a paralegal.

She and Presley, a lighting technician, met exactly two years before the day of the accident. They became engaged on Sept. 2 and were returning from a party early the next day when the crash occurred.

“There’s no winner here. There’s no way we feel like we’ve won something,” Ron Daniel said.