‘She Was My Joy,’ Runnion Testifies

Samantha Runnion idolized storybook heroes and probably spent the last hours of her life praying for one to rescue her, her mother said Wednesday in testimony that evoked tears from jurors deciding the fate of the girl’s murderer.

Instead of being saved, the 5-year-old suffered a “humiliating” death, Erin Runnion said in Orange County Superior Court in Santa Ana.

“What infuriates me is I know she thought somebody would save her,” Runnion said. “Her entire vision of the world was devastated.”

“It’s just so cruel,” she added near the end of her remarks, her voice rising in anguish. As jurors dabbed at their eyes, the foreman passed around a box of tissues.

Addressing jurors and Assistant Dist. Atty. David Brent -- and ignoring her daughter’s killer, Alejandro Avila -- Runnion at various times cried, smiled and gently laughed.

“She was my joy,” the mother said. “She brought happiness to everything I did.”

The four-woman, eight-man jury convicted Avila, 30, a Lake Elsinore factory worker, last Thursday of kidnapping, sexual assault and murder with special circumstances. Jurors will now vote either that he be executed or spend life in prison without parole.

Assistant Public Defender Denise Gragg asked jurors to spare Avila, saying he was scarred by a depraved childhood in a family of abusers and pedophiles.

“It warps you and ruins you and destroys you,” Gragg told jurors in Judge William R. Froeberg’s courtroom. That said, “None of this makes what happened in this case OK, not one minute of it,” she added. “There is no justification for what happened in this case.”

During the remarks by his victim’s mother and his attorney, Avila stared at the long wood table in front of him, his shoulders hunched.

Samantha was snatched as she played outside her family’s Stanton condominium on July 15, 2002. Her nude, battered body was found the next day at a hang-glider’s launch on a cliff overlooking Lake Elsinore.

Runnion’s testimony, alternately poignant and painful, was a venting of sorts for the mother, who had mostly maintained silence since she talked with the media soon after the kidnapping.

“Having to be in this room with the man who killed her definitely brings back the terror,” she told Brent.

She recounted the horror of learning at work that her daughter was missing, and rushing to the grocery store to photocopy fliers with her daughter’s picture and description.

“We ran around giving them to people; we looked in every trash can,” Runnion said. “The world seemed so huge trying to find this little girl.”

Her voice lightened as she recalled “ ‘Mantha” and reflected on the birth last year of another daughter, “the baby sister [Samantha] always asked me for.”

Runnion described a little girl who was an avid reader with many friends, the family cheerleader who left notes in books and lunchboxes saying “Be brave” and “I love you.” When her stepbrother Conner, 10 months younger than she, was learning to ride a bike, Samantha cheered him on with her pompoms.

The image prompted laughter, but the courtroom grew quiet as Runnion talked about how Conner was tormented by recurring nightmares.

“He still thinks [Avila] could get out,” she said.

The courtroom mood relaxed again as Brent showed Runnion eight 8-by-10 photos of her daughter, eliciting smiles from the mother.

She described the pictures: There was Samantha, next to an air-hockey table at her stepbrother’s birthday party at a pizza parlor. Then her second Halloween, when she wore a “big giant fairy princess costume.” Samantha in an inner tube, careening down a slope of faux snow at Universal Studios. Her second birthday -- “I love this picture,” Runnion said fondly. “It just glows. A very happy little kid.”

The prosecution’s only other witness was Virginia Runnion, who said her granddaughter’s death irreparably damaged the family.

She learned Samantha was dead when the family was being interviewed at an Orange County sheriff’s station and she heard Erin Runnion scream.

“It was like having the life sucked out of me,” Virginia Runnion said. “It was just like I went dead. That’s it, I just went dead.”

When a child with a “Goldie Hawn” way of brightening up every room dies “such a vicious death, it’s just not right,” Virginia Runnion said.

Avila’s childhood was said to have been as wretched as Samantha’s was blissful. Gragg showed jurors a three-generation Avila family tree, with victims’ names highlighted in yellow and abusers in green.

Fathers beat their sons and molested their daughters and nieces, a pattern that was passed on to Avila’s father, Gragg said. As a smaller-than-normal boy who enjoyed helping his mother with housework, Alejandro Avila took the brunt of his father’s insults and beatings, she said.

“He was beaten and molested,” she said. “He got both.”

In 1992, as a teenager, Avila watched through a window as his father shot and killed a next-door neighbor. A few years later he traveled with his sister-in-law to Mexico to identify the body of his brother, Juan, a gang member killed in Rosarito.

After a life this hard, Gragg told jurors, giving Avila the death penalty would be the “final act of destruction.”

“Your heart and your soul is going to tell you it doesn’t have to” be that way, she said.

One of Avila’s former co-workers and four of his relatives testified Wednesday, confirming Gragg’s accounts of the verbal and physical assaults he suffered at his father’s hands. One of his cousins described how an uncle molested her. The widow of his slain brother told jurors that his brother’s killing affected Avila more than his other five siblings.

More relatives and friends of Avila are expected to testify on his behalf today, with mental-health experts expected to take the stand next week to describe the long-term effects of childhood abuse.