Killer of Restaurateur Is Sentenced

Felix Magana, a 50-year-old farm worker and father of seven children, was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison Wednesday for shooting a popular Santa Paula restaurant owner to death last fall.

Municipal Judge Bruce Clark handed down the maximum sentence in the case, describing the slaying of 30-year-old Isabel Guzman as a callous and coldblooded crime.

“This was a senseless act,” Clark said, “Isabel Guzman was murdered for no apparent reason.”

Guzman was shot four times by Magana in the alley behind her popular La Playita seafood restaurant while unloading supplies on the evening of Nov. 2.

She had asked Magana to leave the Main Street eatery a few minutes earlier because he had been drinking heavily and showing off his two handguns to the waitresses and arguing with a customer, according to court testimony.

Clark sentenced Magana to 15 years to life in prison for second-degree murder, to which Magana pleaded guilty after prosecutors agreed not to take the case to trial.

The judge gave Magana an additional 10 years in prison for using a firearm during the killing, telling the hushed courtroom that Magana had no reason to carry two loaded weapons that day unless he planned to use them.

As the sentence was handed down, Magana’s wife wept. His daughter had to be helped out of the courtroom. With tears streaming down her cheeks, she collapsed on a bench in the courthouse hallway.

Inside the courtroom, widower Carlos Guzman and his niece embraced and cried as Magana, his jaw tight and his head lowered, was led back to a holding cell.

Earlier in the emotionally charged hearing, Guzman stood rigidly before the judge and described an American dream shattered by the bullet blasts of a drunken man.

As a 19-year-old, he came to the United States from Mexico and worked in the Texas oil fields for more than a decade, Guzman said solemnly.

He became an American citizen, moved to California and fell in love with the “peaceful town” of Santa Paula. Four years ago, he met Isabel. Two years later, they married.

“Our happiness lasted only two years,” he told the judge. “We had so many plans, so many dreams.”

Describing her as a hard-working woman loved by family and friends, Guzman recalled how Isabel had been upset on Nov. 1 because she had not stockpiled enough candy to give the children in their neighborhood on Halloween.

“I told her not to worry, we were going to have so many more Halloweens,” he said, fighting back tears. “The next day this person--what am I saying, this animal--came into our lives and destroyed them with no provocation.”

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Guzman asked Clark to impose the harshest sentence possible.

“The way my wife was gunned down by this beast has to be punished,” he said.

But in an anguished plea for mercy, Magana’s wife of 23 years begged the judge to be lenient. She told Clark that her husband was a good father, a religious man and hard-working provider to his family.

“I have never seen him drunk,” she said, speaking through an interpreter. “He is not capable of doing what he did. I know it was the drinking.”

After Magana staggered away from the murder scene and stashed his guns, he was arrested by Santa Paula police. His blood-alcohol level was determined to be more than three times the legal limit for driving a car.

Because he was so drunk, prosecutors said it would be difficult to prove that Magana formed premeditation and an intent to kill--elements necessary for a first-degree murder conviction.

As a result, they agreed to accept Magana’s offer to plead guilty to second-degree murder last month.

The decision upset Carlos Guzman, who told the judge that he believed “a coldblooded assassin” should not have the right to negotiate.

“Nobody forced him to drink,” he said. “Nobody forced him to do what he did.”