Life Sentence for Murderer of Theater Guard : Courts: There’s no possibility of parole for Jerry Lee Alonzo Jr., who killed Dagoberto R. Carrero in Orange.

Despite a mother’s emotional plea to “let my son come home to me someday,” an Orange County Superior Court judge Friday sentenced 20-year-old Jerry Lee Alonzo Jr. to life in prison without possibility of parole for murdering a movie theater security guard last year.

Alonzo’s family and lawyer had argued for a life sentence with the hope of future release, contending that Alonzo had never been violent, but that he snapped that night because of brain damage caused by drinking and drug use. Previously, a jury rejected these arguments and found Alonzo guilty of murdering Dagoberto R. Carrero, 23, at the Century City Centre Theater in Orange.

During the trial, prosecutors said Alonzo had stalked Carrero out of anger over a past encounter. They said Alonzo watched a movie the night of Feb. 19, 1994, and returned to the theater with a gun to kill Carrero, hiding until people left the lobby. He shot Carrero in the face and back.

*

Carrero, a Gulf War veteran, was working his last shift as a security guard, with plans to travel the next day to Texas to begin training with the Air National Guard.

At Friday’s sentencing, Londie Marshall, 44, Alonzo’s mother, after apologizing to the family of the victim, said her son is “very kind, very generous” and “not that kind of person.”

“Please try to put that night aside,” Marshall pleaded in a letter she gave to the judge before the sentencing.

Alonzo, who faced the judge and avoided eye contact with Carrero family members, said, “I’m sorry for hurting your family the way I have.”

But Judge Kathleen E. O’Leary said the jury had sufficient evidence to conclude that Alonzo had “lain in wait” to shoot Carrero, a special circumstance that gave the jury the option of sending him to prison without possibility of parole. O’Leary said the law did not give her authority to reduce the jury’s sentence, nor would she anyway.

*

Alonzo’s lawyer, Jerome Goldfein, said the jury decision and sentence would be appealed.

O’Leary said the objective of her sentence was to punish Alonzo for a crime she called “about as vicious an act as I have ever seen” and to protect society. “I don’t think any of us will really know why it happened,” she said.

Conceding that others, including a probation officer who met Alonzo in jail, have marveled that Alonzo’s good-natured personality is out of characteristic with his crime, she said, “Unfortunately, there are people who are not monsters who commit monstrous acts.”

Nicole Carrero, the victim’s widow and the mother of his 2-year-old daughter, said she was “very pleased with the sentencing. . . . He won’t have the chance to go out and do the same thing to other families.”