Two men convicted of a 2006 gang shooting will remain in prison, after a successful appeal to the California Supreme Court by the State Attorney General's office.
Jacob Townley Hernandez and Jesse Carranco were convicted of gunning down a 29-year-old man on Feb. 17, 2006, just because he was wearing a blue sweatshirt.
Miraculously, the man, Javier Lazaro, lived, despite being shot five times.
Carranco, of Watsonville, was 16 and Townley, of Santa Cruz, was 17, when they jumped out of a car and attacked Lazaro, who was working three jobs and stepped out of an apartment on 17th Avenue to smoke a cigarette.
The teens, who were tried as adults, attacked Lazaro as part of their passage into a gang. He was wearing blue, which is a Sureño color and they were Norteños, who favor red.
When they approached him to ask if he was affiliated with the gang, he ran away. They chased him down and Townley shot him, three times while he was standing and twice while he was already down.
"He only stopped shooting because he thought he was dead," said prosecutor Celia Rowland Tuesday.
In the original trial, Rowland had asked the judge not to let the defendants see the written testimony of a plea bargain made by two other gang members with the pair. The two witnesses for the prosecution had already been attacked in jail and she feared that having their testimony in writing would be a death sentence for them.
The Sixth District Court of Appeals ruled that the defendants weren't given information they needed as a result, however, in a second appeal announced Tuesday the California Supreme Court decided that the written testimony wouldn't have changed the outcome of the case.
Townley, who pulled the trigger, was sentenced to 32 years to life. Carranco, who used a baseball bat on Lazaro was sentenced to eight years to life, however, his sentence is still on appeal. It could go down to only 10 years.
Lazaro recovered from his injuries, but still has two bullets lodged in his body that couldn't be removed.
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