MORENO VALLEY, CA — A 25-year-old motorist who mowed down two men standing in front of a Moreno Valley restaurant, where they’d watched and laughed at his drunken friend being manhandled by security guards, was convicted Thursday of two counts of second-degree murder.
A Riverside jury deliberated for just over a day before returning with unanimous verdicts against Edgar Ivan Gomez Garcia of Mead Valley for the deaths of 29-year-old Junior Rafael Gonzalez and 39-year-old Pedro Cortes Rodriguez in 2019.
Along with the murder counts, jurors found Garcia guilty of sentence- enhancing allegations of using a deadly weapon — a vehicle — in the commission of a felony and fleeing the scene.
Riverside County Superior Court Judge Bernard Schwartz did not immediately set a sentencing date. He ordered Garcia to remain held without bail at the Byrd Detention Center.
In the predawn hours of Oct. 18, 2019, the defendant and his then- friend, identified in court documents only as “Hector,” went to the El Rodeo Club & Restaurant at 24805 Alessandro Blvd., where Hector became inebriated, according to a trial brief filed by the District Attorney’s Office.
He was involved in an unspecified confrontation with a club patron that turned physical, culminating in two security guards hustling him out of the establishment into the parking lot, where the heavily intoxicated man continued to remain belligerent, court papers stated.
The guards deployed pepper spray, and one of them threw a gut punch, causing Hector to keel over in the parking lot, according to the brief. Garcia was walking to his friend’s Ford F-150 pickup truck when he saw what happened, prompting him to challenge the men to a fight but was talked out of it by another employee of the venue, prosecutors said.
Hector was unable to walk unassisted, requiring Garcia to “drag him through the parking lot,” at which point the victims, among a group of friends, “laughed and began to take video of Hector being dragged,” the brief said.
The defendant, inflamed by the group’s behavior, placed his friend in the pickup’s passenger seat and got behind the wheel. A security surveillance camera mounted on a business across the street recorded the ensuing moments after Garcia started the truck.
“The video captured the truck pull out of a parking stall and drive up the parking aisle toward a store next to El Rodeo,” according to the brief. “The truck turned right in front of the store, towards El Rodeo, and rapidly accelerated, screeching its tires. The truck came to an abrupt stop before reaching the front of El Rodeo. After a couple of seconds, the driver accelerated into the crowd. The footage captured the truck striking the victims and dragging their bodies across the asphalt.”
Witnesses dialed 911 as Garcia sped away.
Junior Gonzalez was pronounced dead at the scene. Rodriguez lingered in a coma for nine days at Riverside University Medical Center before he was taken off of life support.
Sheriff’s detectives gathered sufficient evidence from witnesses, as well as the Moreno Valley Citywide Camera System, to identify the pickup and its owner. That led to an interview with Hector several days later, during which he recalled only vague details about the incident, saying he remembered being helped into his pickup and into his son’s bed after arriving home, but virtually nothing else — and Garcia didn’t tell him anything, according to court papers.
He told investigators Garcia had been staying with him, sleeping on his living room couch for weeks, while the two went to work in Brea, but a day after the restaurant deaths, the defendant abruptly left and returned to his mother’s house in Mead Valley.
In a text message on Oct. 20, 2019, Garcia “encouraged Hector to get rid of the truck and to burn it,” the brief said.
Based on the evidence, especially eyewitness identification of Garcia as the driver, a warrant was obtained, and on Oct. 22, 2019, he was arrested without incident in Moreno Valley.
He has no documented prior felony convictions in Riverside County.
