Jury Recommends Death for Convicted Murderer : Courts: The killer stabbed a Santa Ana silk screener 14 times and slashed his neck during a robbery. The victim’s parents come from Mexico to attend the sentencing.

A jury on Thursday recommended the death sentence for an Orange landscaper who fatally stabbed his victim during a robbery in 1993.

Two jurors dabbed at tears as the verdict was read against Alfredo Valencia, 35, a longtime criminal convicted last month of murder and a special circumstance of robbery that made him eligible for the death penalty.

Roberto Cruz, a silk screener in Santa Ana, was stabbed 14 times in the torso and his neck was slashed after he and Valencia drove Cruz’s car to a parking lot in Cypress on Dec. 15, 1993.

“He got a just judgment because he killed an innocent man,” the victim’s father, Martin Cruz, said in Spanish after the verdict. “He tortured him.”

Cruz had been sending his earnings to his family in rural central Mexico since arriving in the United States in 1989, said the prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Lewis Rosenblum. The parents, on their first trip outside the region to attend the penalty phase of the trial, said their son wanted to succeed.

“He just came to progress and to help,” said his mother, Juanita Cruz.

Valencia did not react noticeably to the verdict.

The prosecutor said the pair might have gotten together because Valencia said he wanted to buy Cruz’s car. After the slaying, Valencia stole a backpack that might have contained $653 from a paycheck Cruz cashed earlier that day, and tried to steal his wallet.

Authorities never recovered the backpack or wallet.

Valencia’s defense lawyer, Deputy Public Defender Sharon Petrosino, declined to comment on the verdict.

Petrosino and a second defense attorney admitted the stabbing but said Valencia was guilty of a lesser crime of manslaughter because he was addicted to drugs and suffered a mental illness that made him believe mistakenly that Cruz was about to attack him.

Petrosino had asked jurors for mercy, saying Valencia was shaped by an unhappy childhood during which his alcoholic father abused his mother, Valencia and siblings. She said Valencia turned out to be a caring uncle who wants to steer his nieces and nephews away from drugs and other trouble.

Rosenblum depicted Valencia as a hardened criminal with a record including 17 convictions for armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon and grand theft.

“The thing that is so devastating in this case is the family of Roberto Cruz. These were such humble people and their son was such a good son,” Rosenblum said after the verdict. “It’s devastating.”

Valencia is scheduled to be sentenced by Superior Court Judge Francisco P. Briseno on Oct. 20.