Guatemalan Native Faces Trial in Alleged 1990 Revenge Slaying : Courts: Elmer Orellana, 21, will be tried as an adult. He says his father forced him to participate in killing of a North Hollywood man.

A 21-year-old man from Guatemala was ordered Wednesday to stand trial as an adult for the 1990 revenge killing of a North Hollywood man who allegedly massacred seven members of the Guatemalan’s family five years earlier in the Central American country.

Commissioner Gary A. Polinsky of the San Fernando Valley juvenile court ruled that although the killings took place when he was only 16, Elmer Orellana was unfit to be tried as a juvenile, in part because, since he arrived in the United States illegally in 1987, he used various aliases and false birth dates that made him appear to be older then he really is.

Orellana, who contends that his father forced him to participate in the 1990 killing, has been jailed since his arrest in June and will be arraigned on murder charges within three days in San Fernando Superior Court. He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted.

In making his ruling, Polinsky noted the unusual, often conflicting and confusing elements in the case, that at times sounded like a tale from the surrealistic novels of Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

“The problems we have here are quite unique,” Polinsky said.

Orellana’s attorney, Gerson S. Horn, said Orellana “is not denying his involvement, but because of the extraordinary and compelling factual circumstances in this case,” he should be tried in juvenile court.

He said Orellana “has a personal history wracked with trauma and has witnessed unspeakable horrors.”

The district attorney’s office wants Orellana tried as an adult, citing the seriousness of the crime. Prosecutors at first contended that he was at least 18 at the time of the North Hollywood killing, basing his age on his fake identifications.

But in a Municipal Court hearing in January, Orellana’s attorney produced a certified birth certificate and passport showing his true age at the time of the murder to be 16, and the case was sent to juvenile court.

“He has used so many different dates of birth, I’m not sure how old he is, and he probably doesn’t know how old he really is, either,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Kenneth Barshop.

The prosecutor said he does not know whether Orellana’s story of his massacred family and the revenge killings is true, but admitted that it could play a role in the final outcome of the case.

“It may mitigate his actions, but it does not excuse them,” he said.

There are at least two stories of the events that led up to the 1990 killing.

A July 1, 1985, edition of the Spanish-language newspaper La Opinion carried a wire-service story with a Guatemalan dateline reporting the deaths of “new victims of political violence in Guatemala.”

Citing a police spokesman, the story said that on June 28 of that year, seven members of a family were gunned down in their home in the village of Vieja Anguiatu near the Salvadoran border by a group of men armed with machine guns.

Five of the bodies were found in the entryway of the house, while the bodies of two women, who apparently tried to escape, were found on a road nearby.

The story identified the victims as Jose Antonio Orellana y Orellana, 74, and Lucila Najera de Orellana, 67, who were siblings, a son, two daughters-in-law and two grandchildren.

The gunmen escaped into El Salvador, and police suggested that the killings were connected to the civil war going on in El Salvador at the time.

But Orellana, through his attorney, insists that some of the facts in the story were wrong, and that the murders of his family were not political killings.

This is the story that Horn says he was told by Orellana:

His father had traveled from their village of Pita Floja into the nearby town of Agua Blanca to pick up some money that had been wired from the United States. On the way back, his father was attacked by bandits, who shot him in the shoulder. The father returned fire and killed one of the bandits. The father went back to Agua Blanca and surrendered to the police, who held him for two months in jail.

While the father was in jail, friends of the dead man came to Orellana’s house and demanded entry. When the family members inside, including Orellana, refused, the men opened fire with automatic weapons. With Orellana watching, the men began torturing his mother, eventually shooting her 17 times.

Orellana was able to escape, and later returned with his maternal grandfather, who lived across the border in El Salvador. In addition to his mother’s body, they found those of his paternal grandparents, an uncle and aunt, and two cousins, 14 and 16.

Released from jail with no charges filed, his father vowed revenge and later found one of the men and killed him.

In 1987, at the age of 14, Orellana came to the United States illegally and began working as a day laborer. The following year, he had his first brush with the law and began using differently aliases and birth dates. In 1989, he was arrested twice for misdemeanor offenses. In all three cases, he was tried as an adult based on the birth dates he provided.

In 1990, his father came to the United States on the trail of another alleged killer of his family, Francisco Guillermo Noguera.

On Jan. 25, 1990, Orellana said his father ordered him to accompany him to a location in North Hollywood, where they waited in their car outside an apartment driveway. The father armed himself with a shotgun and gave Orellana a handgun to protect himself.

Upon seeing Noguera begin to back out of the driveway with a woman, the father climbed out of the car and shot Noguera twice in the chest. The father then yelled at his son, “Shoot, coward, this is your mother’s killer.”

Although he recognized Noguera as one of the men who killed his mother, Orellana said he did not want to shoot him, but finally fired twice, missing both times. The woman accompanying Noguera was not hurt.

Orellana and his father moved back to Guatemala, where a year later his father was killed, allegedly by friends or relatives of Noguera.

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Afraid for his life, Orellana moved back to California. Before resettling in Oregon in 1993, Orellana was arrested again in 1992 for allegedly breaking into a car. Orellana used at least four aliases--Carlos Vasquez, Jose Efrain Monzon, Ricardo Garcia and Mario Monzon. For his arrest in 1992, he used the name Carlos Vasquez and gave a birth date of March 18, 1969.

Using that birth date, Orellana would have been 20 at the time of the Jan. 25, 1990, slaying in North Hollywood. But at the hearing to determine his age, he produced documentation indicating his true date of birth was June 14, 1973, which made him 16 at the time of the crime.

In Oregon, he lived with the mother of his two young children. He was arrested last year on an outstanding warrant for the killing and brought back to Los Angeles.

During the juvenile court hearing, Detective Theodore Ball testified that a cousin of Orellana, who was in prison at the time, told police that Orellana and his father admitted to him that they had killed Noguera and that Orellana said he “was very happy that he participated.”

But a psychiatrist appointed by the court for the defense testified that she believed Orellana was forced by his father to participate in the killing, and that he was suffering from post-traumatic stress as a result of having seen his family massacred.

“I am not convinced that he killed anyone,” said Dr. Jean E. Carlin. “I do not believe he is vengeful.”