Man Sentenced to Life for Killing Gas Station Clerk : Courts: Judge scorns defendant’s claim of innocence. Victim’s mother wants him to be haunted by his actions.

A judge frostily rejected a convicted killer’s claims of innocence Friday and sentenced him to life in prison for the fatal shooting of a Seal Beach gas station clerk during a robbery in March.

“A person would have to be from Mars to think you didn’t do it,” said Orange County Superior Court Judge Anthony J. Rackauckas Jr. as he sentenced 19-year-old Oscar Lemus to a life term with no chance for parole. The killing also carried an extra five years because Lemus used a gun.

Lemus, described by prosecutors as a Long Beach gang member, said he was wrongly convicted because no one saw him pull the trigger and the chief witness was unreliable.

“I’m innocent. I didn’t commit no crime,” he said during the sentencing hearing.

But Rackauckas said evidence was overwhelming that Lemus was the shooter. “Maybe over the years, Mr. Lemus, you can work on that story you just told me,” the judge said.

Lemus and a teen-age accomplice were convicted in separate trials in October of murdering night clerk Danette Garrett while robbing an Arco station of $160 cash and sundries on March 12.

The accomplice, Mario Luis Ortiz, who was 14 at the time, was the first juvenile convicted in Orange County under a new state law that allows children as young as 14 to be punished as adults for the most serious crimes. Ortiz faces up to 38 years to life in state prison when he is sentenced by Judge Eileen C. Moore on Jan. 12.

Lemus, held in the jury box during sentencing, rocked gently and stroked his goatee as the victim’s mother said she hopes he is forever haunted by Garrett’s memory.

“I want Oscar Lemus to remember the name Danette. . . . I want him to remember that he’s responsible for her death,” Joann Garrett said in court. “I want him to dream about her.”

The prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Vickie L. Hix, described the killing as a “vicious, cold crime” in which Danette Garrett was lured into opening the door and shot three times. The killers, Hix said, then sought to steer blame elsewhere by scrawling graffiti of a rival gang.

Hix said Lemus, with previous criminal convictions as an adult and juvenile, learned nothing from previous brushes with the law.

“What we have here is a young man who had several chances to adjust his behavior. Each time . . . he failed again,” Hix said.

Danette Garrett, 33, was found slain in an upstairs office of the gas station on Pacific Coast Highway. Lemus and Ortiz stole cash and condoms, sunflower seeds and batteries. Telephones and a computer printer also were discovered missing.

There were no eyewitnesses to the shooting, but a fingerprint on a packet of sunflower seeds found on the floor led police to Ortiz. A search of his home turned up some of the stolen items and a newspaper clipping about the murder. He implicated Lemus as the shooter.

Ortiz told police that Garrett knew him from earlier visits and opened the door. A girlfriend of Lemus testified that the suspects and a second girlfriend went to the beach and stopped at the gas station for a snack. She said Lemus grabbed a gun as he went inside.

Garrett had recently moved to Long Beach from Florida after a failed marriage. Joann Garrett said that at the time of the slaying, “everything was looking up.”