Prosecutor Says Man Bragged of Plan to Kill Officer

Catarino Gonzalez Jr., 23, bragged at a wedding party shortly before the 1998 shooting of LAPD Officer Filbert Cuesta that he planned to kill Cuesta and his partner, prosecutors charged Monday in opening statements at the gang member’s death penalty trial.

“I’m going to take out Cuesta and [Gary] Copeland,” a party-goer heard Gonzalez say, according to Deputy Dist. Atty. Darren Levine. The prosecutor charged that Gonzalez scrawled out his killing plans in gang graffiti a few days earlier and that a woman watched from an upstairs apartment as the defendant squeezed off 11 rounds.

Gonzalez, Levine said, planned to kill Cuesta and his partner because they were trying to send him to prison and made self-incriminating statements after his arrest.

Defense attorneys countered that Gonzalez is the victim of coerced statements, a lying gang member intent on revenge and a frantic Police Department under intense pressure for arresting the wrong man.

“He was at the wedding reception down the street,” defense lawyer Michael Artan said. “And when the shots rang out, he scrambled over the backyard fence with everybody else.”

The shooting occurred shortly after midnight Aug. 9, 1998. Cuesta, 26, the father of two small children, was shot in the back of the head as he and Officer Richard Gabaldon, 27, sat in their parked police cruiser with the motor running in the 5300 block of Carlin Street. They were in an area where neighbors say rival gangs often fight, and gunshots frequently break the peace of night.

The two officers had radioed for backup to help them break up the wedding party because neighbors had been complaining.

When the shots struck, Gabaldon saw Cuesta’s chin drop to his chest and blood pour from his head, Levine said Monday. Gabaldon jumped from the car, returned fire and circled the vehicle to help his fatally wounded partner. Dozens of police cars raced to the scene. One officer tried giving CPR to Cuesta, while others rounded up nearly a hundred people for questioning.

Prosecutors revealed a portion of that dramatic and chaotic scene in court Monday when they played the audiotapes of the radio communications between a police dispatcher and officers at the scene. As the words “officer down,” crackled repeatedly throughout the courtroom, a distraught Sylvia Cuesta, Cuesta’s wife, sat in the back row with her face buried in her hands before she got up and hurried out of the doors.

Levine said Cuesta and his former partner Copeland--both members of the Police Department’s gang-fighting unit--knew Gonzalez well. Gonzalez once spent 120 days in jail after Cuesta arrested him on a drug charge.

A few days before the shooting, Gonazalez became irate at Copeland, because he thought the officer had “dissed” him in front of his girlfriend during an arrest for drinking in public, according to the prosecutor.

Copeland later saw graffiti on a wall that included Gonzalez’s street name “Termite” and the word “police” crossed out, which Levine said police interpreted as a threat.

Five days later, Gonzalez went to the wedding party, where people heard him complain that the police were looking for him for violating probation from the drug arrest, Levine said. A few hours later, gunfire erupted and Cuesta was dead.

About a week afterward, Gonzalez turned himself in to police because he had heard they were looking for him.

Levine told jurors that during questioning by detectives, Gonzalez said he was shooting at Cuesta because he was “just trying to scare him.” Gonzalez told detectives that he ran away when Gabaldon returned fire, throwing the gun in some trees as he fled. Police never found the gun.

At one point during the detectives’ interview, Levine said, Gonzalez expressed remorse, saying: “I’m sorry for all the things I’ve done,” and “I know his girls are going to miss their father a lot.”

Defense lawyer Artan later ripped into Levine’s statements, telling jurors that police interrogators wore down his client during long, intensive questioning in a windowless room “in the bowels of Parker Center.” Artan said police ignored Gonzalez’s requests for a lawyer and coerced him into making incriminating statements by falsely saying that they had enough evidence to convict him ofmurder.

He said detectives persuaded him to take a polygraph test and then told him that he had failed it and that the test was infallible.

Artan said Gonzalez, the son of a gardener and one of 10 children, never told party-goers that he was going to “take out” Cuesta and Copeland. He said the gang member who supposedly heard that comment lied because he was seeking revenge from an earlier dispute with Gonzalez.

As for the eyewitness who said she saw Gonzalez firing the gun, Artan said she at first denied seeing anything, and then changed her story four months after the incident.