Avila Guilty of Abduction and Murder of Samantha Runnion

Alejandro Avila was convicted Thursday in the kidnapping, sexual assault and murder of 5-year-old Samantha Runnion, whose 2002 disappearance drew national attention during a wave of child abductions.

The case was built mostly on DNA evidence, including what prosecutors said might have been tears that the Stanton girl shed in her killer’s car.

The eight-man, four-woman Orange County Superior Court jury reached its decision after almost nine hours of deliberations that stretched into a second day. It will reconvene Wednesday to vote on whether Avila, a 30-year-old assembly-line worker from Lake Elsinore, will be executed or spend the rest of his life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Samantha’s mother, Erin Runnion, gasped and began sobbing after the court clerk read the verdicts. Two jurors cried, one of them rocking back and forth.

Avila sat hunched in his chair between his attorneys, showing no reaction as isolated sniffles and sobs pierced the silence in Judge William R. Froeberg’s packed 10th-floor Santa Ana courtroom.

After the jurors filed out, dozens of supporters surrounded Runnion. She was embraced by relatives, Sheriff Michael S. Carona and then for a long minute by her husband, Kenneth Donnelly.

During an emotional news conference at which she called her daughter by her nickname, “Mantha,” Runnion thanked the jurors and Sheriff’s Department for doing “so much to make sure that this creep gets off the streets.”

“He is guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty!” she said, her voice crescendoing. “And that feels really good, because nobody should get away with this.”

The verdict tells other pedophiles, Runnion said, that Samantha’s death was not in vain.

“To every pedophile out there, you better stop it now,” she said. “ ... We’re not going to give you an opportunity to get away.”

She paused, then stamped her foot in exultation. “I’m so happy,” she said, a sob contorting her smile.

As Runnion spoke, she clutched the notebook she had been scrawling in throughout the trial.

Samantha was kidnapped July 15, 2002, as she played with a friend near her family’s condominium in Stanton. The playmate told police that a mustached man in a green car had approached them, asking for help finding a lost puppy, then pulled Samantha into his car.

Her nude, beaten body was found the next day at a popular hang-glider spot near Lake Elsinore. She had been sexually assaulted, then suffocated as someone pressed on her chest. Her body was positioned with her legs spread.

“What kind of animal poses someone like that?” Assistant Dist. Atty. David Brent had said in his closing statement.

During the trial, prosecutors painted Avila as a twisted pedophile who killed Samantha so she could not accuse him of molesting her, as two girls had previously done.

He was acquitted of those charges in 2001, but the girls were allowed to testify against him in the murder trial.

DNA provided the most powerful evidence of Avila’s guilt. Tests showed an overwhelming likelihood that his DNA was present in material found under the girl’s fingernails, which prosecutors theorized got there as she fought him during the attack. Tests also suggested that Samantha’s DNA was on the passenger-side door of Avila’s 1994 Ford Thunderbird, presumably from her tears, prosecutors said, as he drove her around Southern California.

Avila’s attorneys had said he was in a Temecula motel room all night, hoping that a girlfriend he had been fighting with would stop by to reconcile. Crime lab scientists misinterpreted the DNA evidence, the lawyers said, and they contended that Samantha’s genetic material had been planted in their client’s car.

Prosecutors dismissed the defense’s claims as “distractions.”

After her daughter was kidnapped, Erin Runnion appealed to her abductor on television, pleading with him to bring back the girl she had nicknamed “mi cielito linda” (my pretty little sky) and “tigrita” (little tiger). Samantha would have turned 6 a week after the kidnapping, and her mother had already bought most of her presents: a dinosaur puzzle, Lincoln Logs and new dresses for her Barbie dolls.

Samantha’s slaying occurred amid a series of incidents involving children, including the murder of 7-year-old Danielle van Dam of San Diego and the abduction of 15-year-old Elizabeth Smart in Utah. After Avila was arrested, CNN interviewer Larry King dubbed Carona “America’s sheriff,” and President Bush credited him during a public appearance with finding Samantha’s killer.

More than 4,000 people attended Samantha’s memorial service at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove. After her death, then-Gov. Gray Davis ordered a statewide expansion of child-abduction alerts posted on electronic billboards along freeways. Since then, all of the 47 Amber alerts have resulted in safe homecomings for the children involved, Carona said Thursday.

As he stood with Erin Runnion after the verdict, Carona’s voice broke when he thanked her for “not holding it against us for not bringing her daughter home alive, for believing in us and becoming part of our family.” His voice was stronger as he lauded the jury, harking back to the confident statement he made to the media when Avila was arrested four days after the kidnapping.

On Thursday, he said: “Today I can stand before you because 12 people looked at all of the evidence and have made that same decision: They are 100% sure that that man, Alejandro Avila, committed that crime.”

Avila’s court-appointed attorneys declined to comment after the verdicts were read.

During the sentencing phase, expected to last less than two weeks, Samantha’s relatives are expected to describe the effects of her murder. Avila’s friends and family will also have the chance to tell jurors why they think his life should be spared.

“We’ve gone a long way toward justice at this point,” said Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas, “but we have another step to go.”

The guilty verdict ensures “that there will never be another child victim of Alejandro Avila,” he said.

Carona praised Runnion for turning her grief and anger into action to help other families keep their children safe.

Runnion has co-founded the Joyful Child Foundation, a nonprofit child safety advocacy group. In January 2004, the organization launched Samantha’s Pride, a program that relies on parents and other caretakers to take turns supervising children and keeping an eye out for predators.

“One little girl gave her life to make it all happen,” Carona said.