2 Get Life Sentences in Fatal Carjacking Case : Crime: Triggerman, other defendant get harshest terms possible in 1991 incident in Westminster park in which a teacher’s aide was killed.

The final two defendants in a carjacking that left a teacher’s aide fatally shot in a Westminster park almost three years ago were sentenced Wednesday to the harshest terms possible under state law.

Triggerman Enrique Segoviano, 20, was sentenced by Superior Court Judge Luis A. Cardenas to life in prison without the possibility of parole for first-degree murder, plus nine additional years for other counts that included carjacking, robbery and belonging to a criminal street gang.

Antonio Gonzalez, 23, who went to Bowling Green Park with the other gang members but had no weapon when Janet L. Bicknell was shot in her car, was sentenced to life in prison for first-degree murder.

The youths, all members of a Santa Ana gang, were arrested shortly after the August, 1991, shooting at a nearby convenience store, where they had stopped to cover rival gang graffiti with their own slogans. They had allegedly planned to steal a car and use it in a drive-by shooting on rival turf.

When Bicknell, a 49-year-old playground supervisor at a Huntington Beach school, refused to turn her car over, Segoviano shot her in the head.

Deputy Dist. Atty. John Anderson said the sentences should send a strong message to gang members.

“I’m extremely satisfied that the conduct warrants the sentence, and I truly hope that gang members will see the consequences and take, if nothing else, an instant to think about what they’re doing,” Anderson said. “This case is a fine example of gang group behavior and how dangerous it is. It’s more than appropriate for the court to sentence in the fashion that it did.”

Gonzalez’s attorney, however, countered that his client’s sentence stemmed from hysteria over gangs and far outweighed his culpability in the murder.

“He wasn’t the perpetrator, he didn’t have the gun, and he was 80 feet away when the crime occurred,” Jerome Goldfein said of Gonzalez. “It’s clear that my client was less culpable than any of the others and certainly less culpable than one who got probation.”

Gang member Christopher F. Martinez, who both the defense and prosecution say was an instigator of the carjacking, pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, testified against the others and received probation.

A 14-year-old pleaded guilty, and Gonzalez’s brother, Edel Gonzalez, who was 16 at the time, was sentenced last year by Cardenas to life in prison without the possibility of parole, making him the youngest person in Orange County history to receive that punishment.

In a written plea to Cardenas, Bicknell’s brother, John Bicknell, urged that the defendants be sentenced to death.

“The young men you have before you shot and killed my sister. They destroyed her without a thought,” his statement said. “I believe they should be given the same punishment they gave Janet.”