Jury Votes Death for Johnson

A Ventura County jury recommended the death penalty Wednesday for a mentally disturbed Vietnam veteran convicted of killing a sheriff’s deputy.

Michael Raymond Johnson, 50, paled slightly as he listened to the verdict the jury delivered after five agonizing days of deliberations to a tense, packed courtroom.

Several jurors began crying before the verdict was read.

“It was easily the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make in my life,” said juror and retired accountant Pat Latipow, smoking inthe parking lot after the verdict was rendered. “I know it’s the law and it is our duty. But no one should have to decide whether a person lives or dies.”

After a six-week trial, the jury in January took just one day to convict Johnson of first-degree murder for fatally shooting Sheriff’s Deputy Peter J. Aguirre.

The 26-year-old deputy was shot four times on July 19, 1996, when he responded to a domestic-disturbance call in Meiners Oaks. He died before he could draw his gun.

Johnson fired the final bullet at point-blank range into Aguirre’s head.

Jurors said it was that final shot that convinced them Johnson should be put to death for his crime.

“It was the fact that there was that final coup de grace shot, where he leaned over and shot Peter Aguirre . . . then ran out and tried to shoot” Aguirre’s partner, explained the jury foreman, who asked not to be named.

Johnson is the 10th Ventura County killer to be subject to a death penalty since capital punishment was reinstated 20 years ago.

Aguirre’s slaying marked the first time in 36 years that a county sheriff’s deputy was killed in the line of duty.

Outside the courtroom, Ventura County Sheriff Larry Carpenter, wearing his dress uniform, told a throng of reporters that “justice had been done.”

“This was a very, very difficult decision for the jury to make,” said Carpenter, who vowed to push for the death penalty the day after Aguirre’s slaying. “I feel for them. . . . They had to decide to pull the trigger, and that’s a very hard decision to have to make.”

The courtroom was silent as Judge Steven Z. Perren somberly read the verdict. Prosecutors, more than two dozen family members and law enforcement officials--including Carpenter and Dist. Atty. Michael Bradbury--held their breath.

Public defender Todd Howeth sat with his back ramrod straight, and tears streamed down his face. Johnson’s family did not move or cry.

Aguirre’s family sat holding hands and embracing silently. His father’s eyes filled with tears.

“He just kept saying what he has been saying all along, ‘My son is dead. My son is dead,’ ” said Enedina Aguirre, the deputy’s widow.

Now, she said, her challenge is raising the couple’s 5-year-old daughter, Gabriela.

“She still thinks he’s at work,” Enedina Aguirre said. “This is something we still have to live with. It’s not going away.

“Gabby wants to become a police officer so she can find out where her father is.”

Outside the courthouse, Aguirre and her mother hugged several jury members and thanked them for their verdict.

Jurors said it took three votes to reach a unanimous decision to recommend Johnson’s execution.

“We had a couple of people who were skittish about the death penalty,” the jury foreman said.

The first vote was split evenly with many of the jurors undecided, Latipow said. The jurors then methodically went through each charge. They carefully reread pages of testimony and even requested Johnson’s mental health records.

By the final day of deliberations only one juror remained undecided.

After reviewing the evidence a last time, her fellow jurors finally persuaded her to vote for the death penalty.

The jury spent 11 days hearing testimony on whether the Vietnam veteran should be sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison or be executed by lethal injection.

During the first three days of the trial, Aguirre’s friends, widow, and mother tearfully testified about the pain they have endured since his death.

His partner, Deputy James Fryhoff, told the jury that he wished he had killed Johnson when he had the chance. He said he still wakes in the night, reaching for a gun that isn’t there, in a final, failed attempt to save his fallen partner.

Aguirre’s wife testified that her daughter still waits for her father to come home. She said Gabriela loves to hear her father’s voice so much that she has learned to use the VCR, to endlessly play videos of her and her father playing together.

And finally, in testimony so heart wrenching that weeping jurors had to be rushed from the courtroom, Aguirre’s mother testified about what it was like to lose her only son--the first child on both sides of the family to graduate from college.

In seeking the death penalty, prosecutors also argued that this is not the first time the five-time felon has gone on a violent rampage.

Although they acknowledged what Johnson did was wrong, defense attorneys argued that he is no “sane, cold-blooded killer.” They said Aguirre’s killing was a crime committed by a man crippled by mental delusions.

They cited Johnson’s military service as an example of his contributions to society.

In 1966 he went to Vietnam, where he served in some of the Army’s most dangerous assignments.

Witnesses testified that in the year leading up to the shooting Johnson made efforts to break the drug and alcohol addictions that had plagued his adult life.

He took classes at Oxnard College, cleaned up his appearance and religiously attended his counseling sessions in Ojai. He eventually began counseling others with similar afflictions.

And, in their most powerful defense, Johnson’s public defenders sought to portray Johnson as a man who has suffered from paranoid delusions for years.

For example, in late 1994, Johnson told a Ventura County Behavioral Health social worker he had bizarre delusions.

“He had prominent delusions that he belonged to a world of organic eaters who have been forced to go underground to wage a defense against the vast majority of others,” psychiatric social worker Marcia Miller wrote in a report.

He also told a prison psychologist that he robbed a McDonald’s in 1986 as a “warrior for Krishna,” trying to show customers that eating meat was bad.

After he shot Aguirre, Johnson himself was wounded and fell to the ground mumbling, “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna.”

While complimenting Johnson’s defense team, jurors said evidence that Johnson was a schizophrenic ultimately was not convincing.

Jurors said they were not swayed by the emotional testimony of Aguirre’s family, either.

“We looked at that but it was not an overwhelming consideration,” she said. “Mr. Johnson had a family too, and they are victims of this as well.”

Juror Jim Burens, who served as jury foreman for the first half of the trial, said this case is something he and his fellow jurors will never forget.

“I told them, this is going to be in your top 25 all-time memories.”

Correspondent Dawn Hobbs contributed to this story.

* RELATED STORY, A14