1 Youth Guilty in Slaying of Teen-Ager : Courts: Two other Long Beach high school students are acquitted in ‘Ace of Spades’ killing.

One teen-ager was convicted of second-degree murder and two others were acquitted Wednesday in the “Ace of Spades” strangling of a 16-year-old.

A Superior Court jury, after eight days of deliberation, found Michael McDonald, 18, guilty of the Feb. 1, 1992, murder of Alexander Giraldo, a member of a Long Beach Polytechnic High School paramilitary gang known as the Ace of Spades.

Schuyler MacPherson, 19, and Bryan Davis, 18, were acquitted. Prosecutors had sought first-degree murder convictions for all three youths, who were all tried as adults.

Another Ace of Spades member, a 17-year-old who was not identified because of his age, testified that McDonald slipped a guitar string noose around Giraldo’s head and pulled it after the victim had been taken to a San Pedro cliff.

Giraldo was found strangled and stabbed. Defense attorneys claimed that the three defendants were not club members and suggested that Giraldo was killed for breaking the club’s code of silence.

The youth testified against the others after serving an 11-month sentence in juvenile camp for his part in the killing. He said he had made the noose and hit Giraldo during the struggle on the cliff.

A jogger found Giraldo’s body the day after the murder.

Defense attorneys attacked the youth who testified against the teen-agers, an admitted member of the clique, as a habitual liar who testified as part of a plea bargain.

The youth, who had been charged with murder, was allowed to plead guilty to conspiracy to commit voluntary manslaughter. He had the strongest motive to kill Giraldo, the defense said.

“The Ace of Spades had the motive,” MacPherson’s attorney, Jack Fuller, said during the trial. He called the youth “an enforcer for the Ace of Spades.”

The youth testified that Giraldo dropped to his knees after being punched, then McDonald slipped the noose around his neck.

“I stood back,” the witness said. “I saw him struggling with the wire around his neck.”

He said McDonald handed off to Davis, who helped with the strangling. MacPherson, he testified, waited in the car after driving Giraldo to the site.