Avila an ‘Animal,’ Jury Told

Nearly three years after Samantha Runnion was abducted, sexually assaulted and killed, Orange County prosecutors on Tuesday implored jurors to hold responsible the “animal” they said killed the 5-year-old Stanton girl.

Pacing slowly in front of the jury box during his closing argument, Assistant Dist. Atty. David Brent displayed color photos that showed the girl’s battered, nude body at a hang-gliding cliff-top launch point near Lake Elsinore, the city in which the defendant lived.

“He ripped her up so bad,” Brent said of the alleged killer, as one female juror started to cry.

But an attorney for Alejandro Avila, 30, told the jury that the prosecution’s evidence was insufficient to convict his client, who could face the death penalty.

“The only evidence linking Mr. Avila with this crime is circumstantial,” said Deputy Public Defender Phil Zalewski. “It could very easily lead to a wrong conclusion.”

Prosecutors say evidence they have introduced during the monthlong trial, including DNA, tire tracks and footprints, links Avila to Samantha and the crime scene.

Crime lab scientists testified that Avila’s DNA was found under her fingernails, apparently scraped as she fought her attacker.

Also, DNA consistent with Samantha -- perhaps from her tears -- was found near the inside door handle of Avila’s Ford Thunderbird, Brent said, evidence that made it a “one-in-a-trillion” chance that someone besides her was inside that car.

Building a case that Avila was sexually obsessed with young girls, prosecutors also showed jurors evidence that Avila had viewed child pornography websites on a computer in his mother’s apartment and called as witnesses three girls who testified that, several years ago, he had sexually assaulted them.

Avila was charged and acquitted in 2001 of molesting two of the girls, whom he knew through an ex-girlfriend.

Crime technicians testified that Avila’s shoes and car tires matched markings found at the crime scene in the Santa Ana Mountains near his home.

Brent told jurors in his closing that the wealth of evidence against Avila made their jobs easier.

“I’m not actually going to stretch far in this case at all,” he said. “I’m going to ask you to stick with the evidence that was presented, because there was plenty of it.”

In his turn before jurors, Zalewski downplayed evidence of Avila’s shoe print and tire track as “inconclusive.”

“It requires an enormous amount of speculation on the part of the prosecution to make this case fit together,” he said.