Worker Found Guilty of Murdering Supervisor : Justice: Another trial will determine if Jose Luis Maldonado was sane when he killed his boss.

A Vista jury found Jose Luis Maldonado guilty of first-degree murder Friday in the shooting death of his boss, setting the stage for a trial on whether Maldonado was sane at the time of the killing.

During the trial, the six-man, six-woman jury heard several of Maldonado’s co-workers testify that they saw him shoot Juan Lopez twice in the chest and then turn and fire at another of his supervisors, Adrian Flores.

Maldonado, a 22-year-old from Oceanside, returned to Lopez’s body and shot him twice in the back of the head while he lay still, face down on the cement.

Witnesses testified that Maldonado, who had previously carried a gun to work, had no disputes with any of his supervisors and that he didn’t say a word to Lopez before the Jan. 29 shooting, which occurred during a morning break at a San Marcos orthopedic products manufacturing firm.

While finding Maldonado guilty of Lopez’s murder, they found him not guilty of attempting to murder Flores, instead convicting him of the lesser charge of assault with a deadly weapon. Flores escaped from the incident unharmed. Maldonado pleaded both not guilty and not guilty by reason of insanity to the two charges, and the same jury will begin next week to consider evidence as to his mental state.

Public defender John Jimenez said an Encinitas psychiatrist evaluated Maldonado nine days after the shooting and will testify that Maldonado was insane.

The evaluation said Maldonado “was unable to distinguish right from wrong at the time of the offense and was, therefore, legally insane at the time of the offense.”

The evaluation, conducted by Nancy V. McTigue, further said that his “psychotic illness is most likely drug induced.”

The evaluation reported that Maldonado said he shot Lopez in self-defense because he thought he was reaching for a gun, although Lopez was unarmed at the time.

Maldonado also described seeing “a visual illusion of horns coming out of Juan and his eyes turning red. He states ‘I thought he was the devil,’ ” the evaluation said.

Over the past two years, Maldonado has heard ringing in his ears and head and had visual hallucinations, including seeing Martians, the evaluation said. No description of the Martians was given.

The evaluation said Maldonado has an extensive history of alcohol and drug abuse, suffers from a paranoid personality disorder, and has been suicidal at times.

Another psychiatrist, Steven Brown, who saw Maldonado at the Vista jail the day of the shooting, said Maldonado “was psychotic, meaning he could not test reality, he could not determine the difference between what was real and what was not real,” Jimenez said.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Greg Walden said a court-appointed psychiatrist and a psychologist will testify that they found Maldonado to be sane, and that he was sane at the time of the shooting.

Judge J. Morgan Lester, however, declined to release their evaluations, which are part of the court record, until after the sanity phase of the trial. Unlike the guilt phase of a trial, the defense has the burden of proving that Maldonado was not mentally sound at the time of the shooting.

Also, while the standard of proof in most trials is “beyond a reasonable doubt,” the defense must only show that a preponderance of the evidence points to Maldonado being insane at the time, Jimenez said. Jimenez contends that the evaluation done by the court-appointed psychologist and psychiatrist occurred four months after the shooting and that, in the interim, he received anti-psychotic medication and was under a psychiatrist’s care.

“In that time, he cleared and lost his psychotic (behavior),” Jimenez said.