Jury to Decide: Is it Murder or Manslaughter?

The jury in the murder trial against San Juan Capistrano resident Robert Eugene Vasquez – accused of killing neighbor Bobby Ray Rainwater Jr. – is now deliberating his fate.

Both the prosecution and the defense attorneys agree that Vasquez hid in the bushes in the predawn hours of Dec. 1, 2011, jumped him, punched him, stabbed him and killed him, nearly decapitating him. The only question is was it premeditated murder or did a mental illness lead him to believe he was protecting the neighborhood from imminent danger?

“It isn’t even close what happened in this case,” said Senior Deputy District Attorney Ebrahim Baytieh at the beginning of his closing arguments before the jury. It was a line he repeat many times. Vasquez acted as a vigilante with “utter disregard to human life,” he said. 

Baytieh said Vasquez’s mom, Margo Vasquez, who testified on Monday, pumped her drug-influenced son with gossip that Rainwater was a pedophile and a threat to the rest of the residents at the San Juan Mobile Estates. (While Rainwater was a registered sex offender for a crime dating back to 1985, it did not involve a child.)Mother and son chatted late into the night before the killing, several witnesses said.

But Vasquez didn’t act in a panic, Baytieh said. He waited for his dad to leave for work the next morning and went out hunting Rainwater. He knew Rainwater’s Thursday routine was to help some elderly ladies in the neighborhood put out their recycling bins.

Vasquez tried to figure out a way to get Rainwater into his own home. “Then I would get him breaking and entering, and then I don’t have to explain [anything] to the police,” Vasquez said in a videotaped confession. But the opportunity didn’t present itself. 

“What I was doing wasn’t working. I wanted to f-ing get it over with,” Vasquez told investigators.

Instead, Rainwater walked by so closely to where Vasquez was hiding behind some bushes, he could have tied his shoes if he wanted, Vasquez said in his confession. He went on to say that after stabbing Rainwater in the back multiple times, he had to slit his throat “to make sure that it was finished.”

What Vasquez did, Baytieh said, is the very definition of ambush. The 36-year-old is charged with murder with a special circumstance for lying in wait and nearly killing another man.
But defense attorney Michael Perez said a combination of Asberger’s, a mild form of autism, schizoaffective disorder and drug abuse made Vasquez have an unreasonable belief that his mom, his girlfriend and other girls in the neighborhood were in imminent danger. 

“Disordered thinking,” Perez said, prompted him to defend others.“I’m not taking a chance that he comes back and f-s my mom,” Vasquz told investigators, repeating the same desire to protect his then-girlfriend. 

Perez, who did not put Vasquez on the stand, said his client should be convicted of the lesser crime of voluntary manslaughter based on the testimony of an expert witness, a psychology professor from UCLA who came up with the schizoaffective disorder diagnosis. 

“The unreasonable defense of others takes out the malice. By taking out the malice, it’s not a murder,” Perez said.

But Baytieh did his best to discredit the professor, calling him a liar for admitting he did dictate his report instead of typing it himself as he first claimed. The prosecutor said “UCLA’s founders would be rolling in their graves” to hear the kind of unprofessional – and at $350 an hour, high-priced – testimony which came from Charles Hinkin, who only recently met Vasquez and did not review the 2 ½-hour videotaped confession as part of his assessment.

Baytieh told jurors it was understandable if they didn’t like sex offenders. Fearing their emotions would cloud their examination of the facts, he reminded them several times of the oath they took to apply the law to the facts.

“Most people don’t like these people [sex offenders]. That’s fine. But you can’t say, ‘I’m not going to afford them equal justice under the law.’ That’s not who we are,” Baytieh said.