Runnion Slaying Trial Set to Open

Nearly three years after his arrest, Alejandro Avila will stand trial today in the killing of 5-year-old Samantha Runnion, who was snatched while playing with a friend outside her Stanton home.

In today’s opening statements, the public and the eight-man, four-woman jury will hear the evidence that prosecutors say links Avila, 30, of Lake Elsinore to the crime that alarmed parents across the country with its audacity.

The girl’s playmate described the suspect in the July 2002 kidnapping to a police sketch artist. Several people who saw the drawing in the news media called in to name Avila.

In more than a month of DNA hearings this year, experts revealed that a body hair and genetic material scraped from underneath one of the girl’s fingernails appeared to link the child to Avila.

Lawyers sifted through more than 1,500 prospective jurors to find those who could sit for the death-penalty case, which could last through June. All but 159 were excused because of the length of the trial.

Questionnaires were used to help determine which of those remaining had not been prejudiced by news coverage the case received in the weeks after Samantha’s disappearance and who could be open-minded to recommending either the death penalty or life without parole if they convicted Avila.

Samantha, a girl with a toothy smile and a mop of reddish-brown hair like her mother’s, had just finished first grade when she was kidnapped. She loved Barbie dolls, and she plastered “Hercules” and Peter Pan posters above her bed.

Her friend told police that Samantha was forced into a green car by a man who had pulled over on their street and told the girls that he was looking for a lost puppy. Her body was found the next day in the Santa Ana Mountains.

Police said at the time that they believed her kidnapper held her for several hours, sexually assaulting and eventually asphyxiating her. Officials suggested the girl fought back, scratching her attacker’s face and arms.

Avila, then 27 years old and an assembly line worker at a pacemaker plant, has denied any involvement with the crime. He says he was at a shopping mall in Ontario the afternoon Samantha disappeared. In 2000, Riverside jurors acquitted him of molesting two 9-year-old girls.

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