The past caught up to Donald Ramon Ortiz the afternoon of Nov. 19, 2021. It came disguised as a detective, holding a gun in a gloved hand.
They looked like just another couple getting on in age, walking along a suburban street in the last hours of daylight.
Over two days of testimony, prosecutors made the case that Ortiz was assassinated by the Mexican Mafia. Authorities described evidence that not only tied the alleged killer to the prison gang but suggested he’d been promised membership in the organization for murdering Ortiz, a so-called “dropout.” When Ortiz was released in 2019, he reconnected with the woman he’d met in elementary school and eventually moved into her apartment in Chino. Hoping to keep Ortiz from slipping into old habits, the woman — identified in court only by her initials — didn’t allow his friends from Whittier to visit.Just after 4 p.m. on Nov. 19, 2021, she was walking back from the store with Ortiz when they saw a man lingering on the grass outside her building on Philadelphia Street.
The prosecutor asked the woman if she recognized Ortiz’s killer in the courtroom. The defendant, Cesar Palomino, sat about 20 feet from her, dressed in an orange jumpsuit and draped in shackles.William Drake, a deputy public defender, seized on her failure to identify his client in arguing for the judge to dismiss the murder charge.
The oldest of three children, Palomino was born in Acapulco, according to a report filed in a deportation case whose author, a Stanford psychology professor, interviewed Palomino in a Las Vegas jail in 2004. At 19, Palomino was arrested for carrying a sawed-off shotgun, court records show. A prosecutor wrote in a sentencing memo that Palomino had joined Barrio Pobre, a small Long Beach gang.
There was no luggage in the truck, however, and the inspector noticed that Palomino’s hands were shaking, according to an affidavit filed in federal court. Authorities searched the truck and found 28 cellophane-wrapped bundles of marijuana, about 60 pounds in all, the affidavit says. Palomino admitted he’d been paid $2,000 to deliver the load to Los Angeles.
Palomino would be deported and arrested for illegal reentry three times, records show. The last time, a judge sent him to federal prison in 2013 for seven years and ordered him returned to Mexico. The day Ortiz died, Palomino’s phone at 2:30 p.m. was in Hesperia, where his family lived, Blanco testified. Geolocation data showed the phone traveled along the 15 and 60 freeways, exiting at Central Avenue in Chino at 4:06 p.m.
Extradited to San Bernardino, Palomino made a call from county jail. According to Christopher Bean, a detective for the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, he told an unidentified relative: “They told me if you eat a butterfly, you become a butterfly.” While going through Palomino’s text messages, detectives found an exchange from March 2022 in which Palomino asked a woman for help registering a car that he said was a gift from Quintero.Bean testified that the inmate, David Mendivil, told his spouse: “I’m here with Snuffy’s“He got him,” Mendivil said, according to Bean. “He got him, baby.”.” In the literal sense it would mean they were cousins, but it could also mean they were associates or friends.
Mendivil was in a terrible position. If he answered the prosecutor’s questions, he would be “in great, great, great danger and surely would be targeted for death,” Bean testified.After sitting in jail for a weekend, Mendivil was brought back into court in a jumpsuit and shackles. Collins posed more questions, Mendivil’s answer did not change, and the bailiff returned him to the holding cell.
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