Jury Finds Schoolgirl’s Killer Sane : Trial: Richard DeHoyos knew what he was doing at the time of his crimes, the jurors decide.

An Orange County Superior Court jury decided Monday that Richard Lucio DeHoyos was sane when he sexually assaulted and murdered a 9-year-old girl, setting the final stage to determine whether he should be sentenced to death.

“I want to see him dead,” said Sara Puente, mother of the slain school girl, Nadia Puente, after the verdict was announced. “That is what he deserves. Nothing less than death.”

Despite defense testimony from an array of psychiatrists and psychologists about DeHoyos’ brain damage and personality disorder, the jury after about a day and half decided that the 34-year-old knew what he was doing when he kidnaped and killed the Santa Ana fourth-grader in 1989.

The same jury convicted him Sept. 20 of first-degree murder, kidnaping, rape, sodomy and lewd conduct after two days of deliberations.

DeHoyos described his actions in committing the crime in a taped confession to police in San Antonio, Tex., where he was captured shortly after the killing.

The youngster was enticed into DeHoyos’ car on her way home from Diamond Elementary School in Santa Ana on March 20, 1989. According to the coroner’s report, she was asphyxiated in the bathtub of DeHoyos’ room at the Ha’Penny Inn. Her body was later dumped in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park.

Judge Everett W. Dickey told jurors that he expected that evidence in the penalty phase of the trial should be completed by Friday and that closing arguments and deliberations would take place early next week.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert C. Gannon Jr. left the courtroom Monday without commenting on the latest verdict or the evidence he plans to present during the penalty phase.

DeHoyos’ attorney, Milton C. Grimes, also declined to comment on the jury’s decision but said he intends to call about six witnesses on DeHoyos’ behalf, starting Thursday.

“We will present evidence in mitigation to support our position that he should live and not die,” Grimes said. If not given the death penalty, DeHoyos would receive life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The defense witnesses will include family members and character witnesses from as far away as Texas and Panama. Grimes said that DeHoyos had no other criminal record “that we know of.”

More than half a dozen such witnesses testified for the defense during the guilt and sanity phases of the trial, in each case to support the defense’s contention that DeHoyos’ actions on the day of the killing--beginning with the loss of his job at a Westminster Taco Bell--were a function of organic brain damage and a personality disorder.

Earlier Monday, the jury asked to rehear the testimony of one of the defense’s experts, Dr. Consuelo Edwards, a Santa Ana psychiatrist.

There were six television camera crews and two still photographers in the courtroom when the verdict was announced, but DeHoyos did not react as he did earlier in the trial when he barked and growled at reporters.

Puente family and friends lined the back row of the courtroom, collapsing in each other’s arms when the verdict was announced.