Carasi Given Death Penalty in CityWalk Double Slaying

For the murder of his mother and his ex-girlfriend--crimes which effectively orphaned his own son--Paul Carasi will die, a judge ruled Tuesday, imposing the sentence a jury recommended a month ago.

“These offenses which the jury has convicted you of are almost beyond description in their monstrousness and their incomprehensibility,” Santa Monica Superior Court Judge Leslie Light said.

Carasi did not even blink as Light pronounced the death sentence.

Moments earlier, Light had set the penalty at life without the possibility of parole for Donna Lee, Carasi’s accomplice in the Mother’s Day 1995 slayings of Doris Carasi and Sonia Salinas at Universal CityWalk. The jury could not decide on her punishment and prosecutors chose to accept life rather than try her again.

Before the couple were sentenced, Salinas’ father, addressing the court for the family, referred to the defendants as dogs. He said he hoped they’d begun counting the days they had left to live.

“I hope that this death sentence will be useful for him and her, because she’ll spend the rest of her life buried in a prison,” Tony Salinas said in Spanish. “And I hope God gives me the strength to see him die like they saw my daughter and Mrs. Carasi die.”

Neither defendant spoke. Several of Lee’s relatives watched from the back of the courtroom, but none of them spoke on her behalf.

Henry Hall, Lee’s defense lawyer, said it would be futile to ask the judge to change the sentence because there was no legal ground for him to do so. Lee signed her notice of appeal before the hearing Tuesday morning, he said.

Ralph Courtney, the deputy public defender who represented Carasi, had asked Light to deviate from the jury’s recommendation and instead sentence Carasi to life in prison, calling the crimes “terrible choices” by a man under the “untenable” stresses of financial and personal problems.

“Clearly Paul Carasi is not the worst of the worst,” Courtney argued. “He is worthy of mercy. He is worthy of sympathy.”

Light swiftly turned him down.

“I find that there is no basis whatsoever for doing anything other than imposing the penalty of death as recommended by the jury. The motion to reduce the penalty is denied,” Light said.

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Courtney had also asked for a new trial, saying Light wrongfully forced him to trial, ignoring his pleas for more time to prepare. Then Courtney accused the jurors of deciding the death penalty based principally on gender.

“There is no reason if the death penalty is appropriate for Paul Carasi that it should not be appropriate for Donna Lee,” he said.

“You could have had several years to prepare for this trial and in my opinion the result would have been the same,” Light responded, turning down Courtney’s motion. “The wrong here came into being when these two people put their heads together, and their brains, and left out their hearts and consciences and decided to commit this crime.”

He ordered each defendant to pay restitution of $2,500 to the Salinas family for burial expenses.

As he made his rulings, five jurors listened from the gallery. Heather Rangel, the former jury forewoman, said they came to see their decisions through.

“I’m glad he got it,” she said, referring to the death penalty. “I’m sorry we couldn’t give it to her.”

She said she was also pleased that the judge and Deputy Dist. Attys. John Gilligan and Phil Sterling repeatedly referred to the effect the crimes will have on Michael, now 5, who watched his mother and grandmother knifed to death in a parking lot a few feet away from the car seat where he was strapped.

Maria Salinas, the victim’s sister, has been caring for Michael since his mother’s death.

“He has nightmares. He still doesn’t understand,” she said after court. “He doesn’t have his mother. He doesn’t understand why his cousins do, his friends do and he doesn’t.”

She said she has kept newspaper clippings and an autopsy report for Michael to read if he ever starts to ask questions about what happened to his mother. But, in the end, she said he knows more about what happened that night than she will.