Penalty Phase Begins for Deputy’s Killer

Deputy Dist. Atty. Maeve Fox held up slain Sheriff’s Deputy Peter Aguirre’s badge for the jury to see.

“During the first part of the trial the part of Peter Aguirre you saw was Deputy Peter Aguirre, symbolized by the badge he wore over his heart,” she told them in a low, intense voice.

She flipped it over, revealing a tiny blood-spattered picture of his wife, and then-3-year-old daughter Gabriela.

“But this is the human side of Peter Aguirre,” she said, holding up the photo. “The human side of the tragedy that brings us here.”

Tuesday was the first day of the penalty phase for Michael Raymond Johnson--when the jury will decide whether he should live the rest of his life in prison or die.

Last month the jury deliberated just one day before finding Johnson guilty of first-degree murder and four other criminal charges for Aguirre’s slaying in July 1996.

The jury also found Johnson eligible for the death penalty because of two special circumstances: He committed a murder during a kidnapping and killed an on-duty police officer.

*

Over the next week, prosecutors will call family members, friends and colleagues to show the “ripple of destruction” Aguirre’s death has caused.

Pacing back and forth before the jury, Fox pointed across the room at Johnson.

“He murdered a husband, father, son, lover and colleague. A unique human being with many different facets. That is what we want you to understand,” she said. “That is what we want you to consider.”

In seeking the death penalty for the 50-year-old Johnson, prosecutors will argue that this is not the first time Johnson has gone on a violent rampage.

He ran down a youth in a truck, held up a McDonald’s at gunpoint, committed burglaries and sold drugs, they say.

In his opening statement, however, defense attorney Todd Howeth argued that Johnson is no “sane, cold-blooded killer.”

*

Instead, he will argue over the coming week that Aguirre’s killing was a crime “committed by a man crippled by mental delusions that he fought but could not overcome.”

The defense will present evidence to show that for years Johnson has suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, and thus, does not deserve to die.

After he served in Vietnam he was never the same, Howeth said.

A test administered while he was in prison showed evidence of mental illness. But no one ever followed up, the lawyer said.

He began suffering paranoid delusions.

While in prison for the McDonald’s holdup, he told a psychologist that he committed the crime for Krishna, a Hindu god, to show people that eating meat was bad.

Two years before shooting Aguirre, he thought people were trying to poison the world with multimedia, Howeth said.

He thought his parents were Nazi agents.

*

When police searched Johnson’s car the day of the slaying, they found an empty bottle of Haldol--the medicine he took to stabilize his mental illness.

Howeth told the jury Johnson is not blameless.

“But,” he asked the jury, “is he such a person that he should be eliminated from the human community altogether?”

Following opening statements, prosecutors called Aguirre’s wife, his wife’s sister and best friend to the stand to tell how his death had affected them.

Taking deep breaths and frequent sips of water, Enedina Aguirre told the jury how her daughter still believes her father will come home.

“She’s still waiting for him,” she said. “She wishes every night. She wishes every morning. She wishes on chicken bones. She wishes on stars. She wishes on everything she can get her hands on.”

*

She said Gabriela loves to hear her father’s voice so much she has learned to use the VCR, to endlessly play videos of herself, playing with her father.

She has been taken out of kindergarten because she is too emotionally distraught to continue.

As for herself, she said, there is not a day she does not think of her dead husband, or dream of him.

Enedina Aguirre’s sister became so tearful before her testimony she could not finish spelling her name. And Aguirre’s lifelong best friend, Leonard Mata, became so upset before his testimony that, racked with sobs, he was ushered out of the courtroom. He returned to tell how the loss of his childhood friend led to losing his home and his job.

Aguirre, 26, was gunned down while responding to a domestic disturbance call at the home of Johnson’s estranged wife in Meiners Oaks.

*

After speaking briefly with the wife, Aguirre stepped inside the home and was immediately shot three times by Johnson, who burst naked from a shower, guns blazing, according to testimony during the trial.

The last shot was fired at point-blank range after the deputy collapsed on the floor--his gun still in its holster.

Today prosecutors will call fellow deputies, who will recount how Aguirre’s death affected them, and changed the way they do their jobs.

Then they will call victims from an earlier crime: The manager at the McDonald’s Johnson robbed in Venice in 1986. And the woman whose car he stole to flee.