Man Is Sentenced to Death in 1995 Mother’s Day Murders

For the murder of his mother and his ex-girlfriend--crimes that 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 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 the life sentence 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 God gives me the strength to see him die like they saw my daughter and Mrs. Carasi die,” Tony Salinas said in Spanish.

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.