Man Gets Death Sentence in Ex-Girlfriend’s Murder

For staging the “reprehensible” murder of his girlfriend from his jail cell, and inducing his 16-year-old brother to carry out the slaying, a judge Friday sentenced Juan Manuel Lopez to death.

The murder was a capital crime because victim Melinda “Mindy” Carmody was to be a witness at Lopez’s trial. The 16-year-old was gunned down after she told police Lopez had kidnapped her and agreed to testify against him.

Lopez, 26, a Parthenia Street gang member, bowed his head and cast his eyes down for the entire hearing before Superior Court Judge Meredith Taylor, as several members of the victim’s family spoke movingly of their suffering.

“This is the year we should have been making graduation and senior prom plans. Instead we visit the cemetery,” said Dee Carmody, Mindy’s stepmother. “Our little girl was robbed of the opportunity to become who she was going to be.”

The girl’s grandmother read a letter, and her mother spoke, beginning with a poem the teen had penned before her death. They showed the court family pictures.

Lopez’s mother, Rosario Hernandez, who had taken the victim in for a year after she ran away from home, said she, too, mourned her loss. But she also suffers for her sons, she said, and still believes in her heart they are innocent.

“If they think that with my son’s death they are going to bring back their daughter, fine,” she said. “But what they are going to have is an unjust death.”

She said that Ricardo Lopez, who was convicted of pulling the trigger, told her he wasn’t involved but had confessed to police to protect his family, and that Juan Manuel Lopez never kidnapped Mindy, much less plotted her murder.

“What do you expect a mother to say?” asked Deputy Dist. Atty. John Nantroup.

“The fact of the matter is that Ricardo Lopez committed this crime in front of many, many witnesses, and we proved to the jury that Juan orchestrated the whole thing,” he added. “I really feel that this is the only just and appropriate sentence.”

Two weeks before her death, Carmody testified in a court hearing that she broke up with Lopez, but he wouldn’t let her go. “He said if he can’t have me, no one can,” she said at the hearing, where a judge ordered Lopez to stand trial.

The jury that convicted Lopez found that he plotted Carmody’s death from a cell in jail, where he awaited trial on charges of kidnapping and attacking her. He lured her to her death with the ploy of a friend’s gang initiation.

His brother Ricardo, then 17, emptied a gun into the girl as she tried to run away, then fired a final fatal round into her head. He later confessed and led police to the murder weapon, which he had hidden in a heater in the living room of his house on Roscoe Boulevard.

Both brothers were convicted in July of first degree murder. The jury deliberated less than 45 minutes before recommending death for the elder Lopez.

Because he was a minor at the time, Ricardo Lopez was not eligible for the death penalty. He is expected to be sentenced to life without the possibility of parole later this month.

The slaying, born of Juan Manuel Lopez’s “need to show power over everyone else,” devastated many people’s lives, Taylor said at the end of Friday’s hearing.

Carmody’s relatives sobbed as the judge imposed sentence.

“Sometimes I think the death penalty is too good for him,” Carmody’s grandmother, Edna Steffen, told the court. “To take a human life, who does he think he is, God?”