Ex-Gang Member Testifies on Killing

Former gang member Chris Gonzales said he wanted to stop his friends from delivering the blows that ended 18-year-old William Zara’s life.

“I was telling people to jam, just leave,” Gonzales testified in the Zara murder trial on Monday. “I tried to tell them the police were coming.”

But that didn’t stop the pummeling, delivered to Zara and his neighbors because gang members mistakenly believed they called Ventura police on their loud party across the street.

Gonzales, who was given immunity for his part in the assault in exchange for his account of the beating death, said he tried to run from the attack when he heard someone scream, “Benny, stop, stop Benny.”

He turned to see Benny Lopez, one of the four defendants, swing a bat over Zara’s head, knocking him to the ground.

“He had the bat clutched in his hands and he was swinging it down like he was chopping an ax,” Gonzales testified.

Lopez, 20, Frank Olvera, 23, Rosana Olvera, 37, and Terry Schell, 23, are all on trial on suspicion of murder and conspiracy to commit an assault for the Sept. 26, 1999, beating death of Zara, a stagehand at the Ventura Theatre.

Ramiro Salgado, 21, has also been charged with murder in the beating, but he will be tried separately.

Lopez took off his glasses and wiped his eyes as his former friend told jurors how Lopez lifted the bat repeatedly to strike Zara over the head and upper body, even as the teenager lay motionless, face down on the ground.

“I went and grabbed him and pulled him off [Zara],” Gonzales said. “Then I went to take off, and he went back and started hitting him again.”

Gonzales, 24, was originally indicted in the murder by the grand jury but later cut a deal with prosecutors. Gonzales, who is the nephew of Rosana Olvera, said he is now in a witness-protection program, living far away from his gang ties along Ventura Avenue, territory claimed by one of the city’s largest street gangs.

Gonzales said he lives in hiding now, existing on the $1,600 a month he receives from the protection program. To return to Ventura County after testifying would mean his own death, Gonzales said. Prosecutors have also promised to remove his gang tattoos.

Gonzales said he was living at Rosana Olvera’s house at the time of the beating.

He grew up surrounded by the gang mentality, and knew all the rules, he said. When a friend of yours is in a fight, you jump in too, he said. “You do what you’ve got to do,” Gonzales said.

Prosecutors allege that’s what happened when Rosana Olvera confronted her neighbors for supposedly calling the police on a party at her house on East Warner Street.

After police left, she approached her neighbors’ complex, grabbed a girl sitting outside by the hair and punched her several times in the face, Gonzales said. Soon thereafter, at least eight others from the party joined in the fight, punching and kicking the group of neighbors.

At some point during the eight-minute melee, Gonzales said, he saw Salgado swing a shovel at Zara, who had armed himself with a bat on the steps of his apartment. Zara fell to the ground before he was pummeled with his own bat by Lopez, Gonzales said.

Gonzales said he later ran to a nearby orchard and helped Lopez bury the bat. Earlier this month, Gonzales led investigators to the bat, still buried in the field next to East Warner Street.

Testimony in the trial will continue today as defense attorneys cross-examine Gonzales.