Defiant Triple Killer Sentenced to Death

After a tirade punctuated with profanity, a gang member already serving life in prison was sentenced to death Wednesday for killing three men in South Los Angeles in 1994.

“As for death, we all gotta go someday,” Marcus Dorwin Adams told Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lance Ito.

“I can’t say I’m sorry. I ain’t sorry for anything I ever did,” Adams said as his shackles clanked and his mother sobbed. “All I regret is watching my mom, hearing my mom cry.”

Adams scoffed at the families of his victims, Lamar Armstrong, Dayland Hicks and Trevon Boyd. He called the three men casualties of gang warfare and said he had no remorse.

In April, Adams was convicted of first-degree murder for killing Armstrong, 19; Hicks, 22; and Boyd, 20. Later, the jury fixed punishment at death.

On Sept. 7, 1994, as the three friends sat in a car near 47th Street and Western Avenue, Adams shot them repeatedly. Hicks and Boyd died at the scene. Armstrong lived long enough to reach a hospital.

“If I had known that morning when I talked to my son it was going to be for the last time, I would’ve taken him and held him in my arms and kept him with me all day,” Armstrong’s mother, Doris Hayes, told the court before turning her attention to Adams.

“There’s a higher power you have to answer to,” she said. “May God bless your soul.”

To that, Adams later responded: “I don’t want your prayers.”

His attorneys declined to comment.

Adams is serving a sentence of life in prison without parole for his role in a 1997 robbery-homicide at Vandenberg Federal Credit Union in Santa Barbara County.

It was that holdup, in which Christine Orciuch, 48, a mother of three, was shot to death, that led to Adams’ arrest in the Los Angeles murders. While the robbery was being investigated, an eyewitness to the triple homicide came forward.

Chester Orciuch, 49, Orciuch’s husband, traveled from Lompoc for the sentencing. He vowed to attend the execution.

By law, the death sentence will be appealed automatically, a process that could take years.

Before Ito imposed the sentence, Pearl Thomas, the defendant’s mother, expressed sorrow.

“It hurts to sit here and be here and know that my son could do this,” she said.