Jury Hears 2 Versions of Teenager’s Slaying

Melinda “Mindy” Carmody was gunned down on a Northridge street for one reason, a prosecutor said Tuesday: She had testified against her ex-boyfriend at a hearing on assault and kidnapping charges and was willing to keep coming to court to see the case through.

“Not only is this retaliation for her testimony at the preliminary hearing, but it also prohibits her from doing the job at trial,” Deputy Dist. Atty. John Nantroup told a Superior Court jury during closing arguments that began Monday and are expected to conclude today in the case against her accused killers. “Don’t let them have accomplished that purpose.”

The 15-year-old girl’s former boyfriend, Juan Manuel Lopez, 25, faces the death penalty if convicted on a charge of murdering a witness, and is also accused of the earlier charges that allegedly led to Melinda Carmody’s killing. His brother, Ricardo Lopez, who was 17 when he allegedly fired the fatal rounds into Carmody two years ago, faces a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted on a murder charge because he was a juvenile at the time.

Juan Manuel Lopez’s lawyer argued that some witnesses were “embellishing” their testimony about admissions his client allegedly made, and that the victim made up the original kidnapping story. The lawyer, Martin Gladstein, said the prosecutor had not proved a murder conspiracy took place and instead was asking the jury to speculate on unanswered questions.

“If you need to speculate to fill in missing pieces, then the people have failed to meet the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” Gladstein said during his argument Tuesday.

Ida Campbell-Thomas, a lawyer representing Ricardo Lopez, told the jury that although her client did pull the trigger, it was not part of a plan but a crime of passion, based on anger and fueled by alcohol. Therefore, she said, he is guilty of manslaughter.

“What we have here is a 17-year-old boy who was angry at the lies Mindy Carmody had been telling,” Campbell-Thomas said. “This anger was festering and he was drinking, and the more he drank, the angrier he got.”

But Nantroup, in rebuttal, said that Ricardo Lopez admitted to police that he had planned to shoot Carmody days before the fatal attack--although he said he only meant to injure her, not kill her.

“By his own admission, he’d planned this days ahead--how does that become an issue?” Nantroup asked. Campbell-Thomas’ argument, he said, “is purely a fantasy.”

The case against the brothers is based on their statements to police, phone calls Juan Manuel Lopez made to relatives and to fellow gang members from jail, the victim’s testimony at a preliminary hearing on the assault and kidnapping charges, and testimony from other female gang members.

At the preliminary hearing, two weeks before she was killed, Carmody recounted how she began dating Lopez at 14, then broke up with him a year later. On March 13, 1996, she said, he broke into her house, and when she refused to leave with him, he hit her, choked her and forced her into a car.

She said that he left her at what she thought was his aunt’s house, and that the woman eventually drove her home, where she called police.

Gladstein suggested Carmody made up the story when she got home to cover up having been with Lopez, pointing to testimony by Lopez’s relatives that she was with him voluntarily and was not injured.

Nantroup said Juan Lopez sent a message to Carmody through another gang member not to testify at the preliminary hearing on those charges. When she testified anyway, he erupted in court, saying he didn’t “have to listen to this,” Nantroup said.

The prosecutor said Juan Lopez then began plotting her death from his jail cell and used the ploy of the “jumping in,” or initiation, of a new member who was a friend of Carmody’s to lure her to the Parthenia Street Gang’s hangout on Schoenborn Street on April 12, 1996, so his brother could kill her.

In a statement to police, Ricardo Lopez said he fired a gun at Carmody until it was empty. Witnesses said that Carmody collapsed after the first few rounds, then began crawling on the street. Lopez, they said, then fired a final, fatal bullet into her head.

“He executes her there in the street,” Nantroup said. “Is there any doubt why he killed her?”