Jurors Will Announce Fate of DeHoyos Today : Crime: The panel first reported a deadlock but said hours later that it had reached a decision.

Jurors will announce today whether convicted murder Richard Lucio DeHoyos should be sent to the gas chamber, after initially telling the judge early Tuesday that they were unable to reach a unanimous decision.

But hours later, after the judge sent them back to the jury room, jurors announced that they had agreed on a sentence.

The jury’s decision late Tuesday, reached so quickly after it appeared to be hung, prompted defense attorney Milton C. Grimes to assume that jurors had voted for the death penalty. In court, he lashed out at the family of murdered 9-year-old Nadia Puente and suggested that they staged emotional outbursts to influence jurors.

Jurors deliberated for nearly five days in the penalty phase of the trial of DeHoyos, 34, convicted last month of the 1989 kidnaping, rape, sodomy and murder of the Santa Ana girl.

Superior Court Judge Everett W. Dickey ordered the jury to go home and return today to announce the verdict. Dickey said he was delaying the announcement of the decision so that two alternate jurors could be there.

One juror cried as she left the court.

Before announcing it had reached a verdict, the jury earlier in the day told the judge it was “split” and could not reach a decision. A hung jury would have meant that Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert C. Gannon Jr. would have had to decide whether to retry the penalty phase in an attempt to get a death penalty decision, or to settle for life in prison without parole.

After jurors told the judge of their apparent deadlock and were sent back to the jury room, what most observers expected to take minutes turned into hours. The jury emerged from the closed room at 2:20 p.m. to take a break. They walked through the courtroom and past Puente family members.

“It was at that time that I became somewhat alarmed at what the relatives of the victim were doing,” Grimes told the court late Tuesday. “I think it was intentionally done in a way to unduly influence this jury.”

He pointed to Sara Puente, Nadia Puente’s mother, as displaying a “great deal of emotion” in front of the jurors as they were leaving for a break.

Saying that he had great empathy for the family’s loss, Grimes added that his primary responsibility as a defense lawyer was to make sure that DeHoyos received a fair trial.

Gannon came to the defense of the family members, saying they have acted appropriately. Puente and other family members said they would not comment.

Grimes also complained that the jurors did not follow the judge’s instruction when they returned to the jury room. He said they were only supposed to decide whether the court could assist them in their deliberations and not to continue to deliberate.

Outside the courtroom, Grimes said he had no further comment. “I had better wait until tomorrow; I could be wrong” in assuming that the jurors have voted for the death penalty, he said. He told reporters that his comments in court could be the basis for an appeal.

Nadia Puente, a fourth-grader, was on her way home from school on March 20, 1989, when she disappeared. DeHoyos enticed the small girl into his car by saying that he was a teacher and took her to a hotel room where he assaulted her, drowned her in a bathtub, put her body in a trash can and dumped it in Griffith Park in Los Angeles.

The same jury that had been deliberating for five days on whether to sentence DeHoyos to death took only two days to find him guilty of first-degree murder, with four special circumstances, making him eligible for the death penalty.