Outburst Leads to Guilty Plea

Minutes before he was to go on trial for the shooting death of a young skateboarder, a San Diego man changed his plea to guilty at the urging of the victim’s stepfather.

Ruben Tadepa was sitting at the defense table Wednesday when the victim’s stepfather, Bill Huffman, called out to him from the spectator section of the courtroom.

“Ruben, why don’t you just plead guilty and not put us all through this?” Huffman said, according to his wife, Caray Huffman, and others who witnessed the incident.

At the time, Tadepa’s attorney and the prosecutor were meeting with the judge in his chambers to discuss details of the trial. Jurors had not entered the courtroom.

Tadepa said nothing in response to Huffman, and a deputy escorted the stepfather out of the courtroom, witnesses said.

But minutes later, Tadepa spoke quietly with his public defender, Jane Gilbert, and switched his plea to guilty of firing on a group of skateboarders outside his home, killing 17-year-old Raymond Lang.

“I think he just thought it was the right thing to do, not put the family through the grief,” said Gilbert, who declined to say specifically what Tadepa told her in court.

The victim’s mother said she was relieved.

“It took him almost a year, but he finally did the right thing,” Caray Huffman said.

Tadepa, a married father of three who worked as a security guard before his arrest, faces a minimum of 50 years to life in prison when he is sentenced Nov. 26.

He has been held without bail since the shooting last year.

Lang was videotaping his friends performing skateboard tricks for a school project.

He and other teenagers had previously quarreled with Tadepa, who allegedly would become angry when skateboarders got close to his car.

Lang, a high school senior, was preparing to tape a final few minutes of the skateboard tricks for his drama class when, according to witnesses, Tadepa ran onto the street with a rifle.

He shot the teenager three times, prosecutor Kristen Amador said.