Man charged in Christmas Eve triple homicide pleads guilty to murder

A San Diego man who killed three people outside a Mission Valley mall on Christmas Eve in 2013 didn’t know his victims, a prosecutor said Thursday.

But that didn’t stop Carlo Mercado from shooting each of them in the head in what was described as a “road rage or carjacking” incident that turned deadly.

More than three years after the shootings, Mercado, 31, admitted in San Diego Superior Court that he killed the first of the victims — Gianni Belvedere — after arguing with him in the mall parking lot and then took his car.

When Mercado returned to the scene less than two hours later, he unexpectedly ran into Belvedere’s younger brother, Salvatore, and Ilona Flint, Gianni’s fiancée.

“They confronted me because I had Gianni Belvedere’s car,” the defendant admitted in a written statement.

Mercado pleaded guilty Thursday to three counts of first-degree murder. Immediately after he entered the pleas, he was sentenced to three consecutive terms of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Deputy District Attorney Brian Erickson said several theories about possible motives for the killings had circulated publicly over the years, and he took some time at the sentencing hearing to make one point clear: This was a random act of violence.

“Gianni, Salvatore and Ilona had nothing to do with their demise,” the prosecutor said. “This could have been any one of us in that parking lot. It literally is being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

By pleading guilty to murder, Mercado avoided the possibility of the death penalty if the case had gone to trial.

Judge Frederic Link accepted the pleas and ordered the sentence mandated by law.

“I still have questions,” Link said, referring to what occurred in the shopping mall parking lot the night of Dec. 23, 2013, and early the next morning.

“It’s just too bad that Mr. Mercado doesn’t wish to say everything,” Link said. “Maybe someday he will.”

San Diego police discovered the bodies of Salvatore Belvedere and Ilona Flint, both 22, on Christmas Eve outside Westfield Mission Valley shopping center, where Flint worked at a shoe store.

Gianni Belvedere, 24, was considered a missing person until his body was found in Riverside weeks later on Jan. 17, 2014, in the trunk of his green Toyota Camry.

Mercado, who lived in Mira Mesa, was arrested in June 2014. Authorities were able to connect him to the shootings through DNA and ballistic evidence.

Erickson explained during the hearing that investigators concluded from the evidence that Mercado crashed his motorcycle near the mall, rendering it disabled, and then approached Gianni Belvedere, who had been waiting to pick up his fiancée from work.

Mercado needed a car, so he shot Belvedere, then pushed the body over into the front passenger seat.

The defendant drove the car to Mira Mesa, where he filled it with gas, and then returned to Mission Valley about 90 minutes later to remove his motorcycle from the crime scene.

Meanwhile, Flint had called her financé’s brother, Salvatore Belvedere, to pick her up from work. They were sitting in a car, making calls to try to locate Gianni, when they spotted his Toyota.

They knew something was wrong. Flint was already wounded when she called 911.

“Mr. Mercado doesn’t even give her a chance,” Erickson said, explaining that the defendant fired at both victims with a .22-caliber handgun, with a silencer, hitting Flint in the back and then the head.

And then he drove off again.

Three weeks later, when Mercado went to Riverside to buy another vehicle, he left the Toyota in the lot of a fast-food restaurant.

A can of air freshener and boxes of baking soda were found in the trunk near Gianni Belvedere’s body, the prosecutor said. The trigger on the air freshener can was duct taped down so it would spray on its own.

Mercado’s DNA was found on the can and the tape, some of which was found on the car’s license plate, as well as on the vehicle’s gas cap.

Authorities said bullets recovered from all three bodies had been fired from the same small-caliber handgun that was registered to the defendant.

Mercado had the murder weapon and two other guns with him on Jan. 18, 2014 — the day after Gianni Belvedere’s body was found — when he was stopped at a U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint on Interstate 5.

After he was prosecuted on weapons charges, his DNA profile was compared against a national database. Investigators got a hit on the items found in Belvedere’s car.

At the sentencing hearing Thursday, one of the Belvedere brothers’ three sisters read letters from the family, including a long one by their mother, Grace.

The mother wrote about her boys’ musical talent — Gianni on the piano, Salvatore on the guitar — and family dinners on Sundays that had been boisterous and happy.

“Now it’s quiet,” she said in the letter read by sister Antoinette Belvedere. “The laughter and loudness have been replaced by silence and sorrow.”

Inga Flint-Jones spoke about her daughter’s birth in the Soviet Union just before it broke apart, and the strength and compassion Ilona Flint had demonstrated in difficult times. She said her daughter fell in love with Gianni Belvedere in high school when she was just 15.

“Life held so much promise for her,” the mother said.

Family members brought with them to court a few snapshots of the brothers and Flint in happier times. They handed them to the prosecutor.

“Do me a favor,” Judge Link said. “Show those to Mr. Mercado.”

dana.littlefield@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @danalittlefield

UPDATES:

This article has been updated with additional details from the sentencing hearing. The article was originally published at 9:30 a.m.