Slaying of El Rio Teen-Ager Ruled Manslaughter by Jury

Twice before the trial, a Ventura County judge warned prosecutors that they were unlikely to get a murder conviction against Ralph Hernandez, accused of stabbing a neighbor during a fight.

“This sounds like a manslaughter case to me,” Judge Steven Z. Perren said at a pretrial hearing Sept. 27. At another hearing a month later, he urged Deputy Dist. Atty. Saundra T. Brewer to try to resolve the case by accepting a guilty plea to a lesser charge.

Last week, after presiding at Hernandez’s three-week trial in Ventura County Superior Court, Judge Frederick A. Jones refused to let the jury even consider a first-degree murder verdict, saying the evidence was insufficient.

And on Monday, the jury decided that it wasn’t second-degree murder or even voluntary manslaughter, but involuntary manslaughter--the least serious homicide charge under California law.

“We’re delighted with the result,” said Hernandez’s attorney, George C. Eskin.

Brewer could not be reached for comment after the verdict, but last week she characterized the slaying as an execution.

According to trial testimony, Hernandez, 19, stabbed Jesse Camarillo, 16, during an early-morning fistfight June 9 on the front porch of Hernandez’s home in El Rio. The pair had exchanged words earlier and Hernandez, standing in his front yard, challenged Camarillo to fight, witnesses said.

But Hernandez had retreated to his front porch by the time the first blow was struck, witnesses said. A friend of the victim testified that Hernandez was trying to escape into his house, unaware that his fearful sister and cousin had locked it from the inside.

Throughout the fight, the victim’s friend said, Hernandez was hunched over while Camarillo pounded him with his fists. At some point, Hernandez withdrew a knife from his pocket and stabbed Camarillo three times in the chest.

Brewer argued that Hernandez lured the victim into a fight and stabbed him immediately. She said the nature of the wounds indicated that Hernandez was standing when he inflicted them. But Eskin cited testimony that the fight was well under way before Hernandez thrust the knife upward and Camarillo groaned, “He shanked me.”

Camarillo died on the sidewalk a few minutes later.

Hernandez and his family moved to El Rio three years ago from La Colonia, an Oxnard neighborhood. Some of their El Rio neighbors taunted them, and at one point their house was spray-painted by vandals, Eskin said, creating a “siege mentality” in the family.

The guilty verdict came about an hour after the jury announced that it had acquitted Hernandez of murder but was split 11 to 1 on the manslaughter charges. When Jones asked whether the panel was hopelessly deadlocked, foreman Bob Macklin said he wasn’t sure that it was hopeless and asked to reconvene.

While the jury deliberated another 45 minutes, Hernandez’s mother, Margie Hernandez, and several other family members waited anxiously in a hallway.

“I feel very hopeful,” Margie Hernandez said. A widow with five children, she had moved in with her sister and borrowed money from relatives to hire Eskin, one of the county’s most prominent criminal defense attorneys.

“My kids come before anything,” she said.

After the guilty verdict was announced, the mother clutched her sister and started to cry. But at the defense table, her son turned to Eskin and whispered, “Thank you.”

According to jury foreman Macklin, 11 members of the panel favored the lesser manslaughter charge while the 12th initially insisted on the more serious one. “Nobody wanted him to walk,” Macklin said.

Macklin said Hernandez was hurt by the fact that he invited the victim onto his property to fight. On the other hand, Macklin said, he believes that Hernandez may have thought that he was acting in self-defense when he stabbed Camarillo.

Involuntary manslaughter is punishable by up to four years in prison. In addition, Hernandez was found guilty of a special allegation that he used a knife in the crime, which could add another year to any prison sentence.

But Eskin said the judge could find that Hernandez deserves probation, which could include up to a year in County Jail. Jones scheduled sentencing for Jan. 8. He also said he would consider next week whether to lower Hernandez’s $100,000 bail, which was set when he was facing the murder charge.

None of Camarillo’s family was in court when the verdicts were read, but the victim’s brother, David Camarillo, said later that he was “a little shocked.”

“I don’t understand why he got such a lesser charge,” David Camarillo said. “I thought justice would be served. To me, it didn’t happen.

“I’ll let God take care of it.”

Times staff writer Sherry Joe contributed to this report.