The prosecutor called the shooting a 'callous and total disregard for human life.' Marcus Anthony Eriz's defense attorney called it 'a momentary lapse of reason.'
www.latimes.com
‘I just grabbed my gun for some reason’: Trial opens in freeway shooting death of 6-year-old
The bullet that killed
6-year-old Aiden Leos punched a small hole in the trunk of his mother’s silver Chevrolet, a few inches from the license plate.
The round traveled through the car’s back seat, through his booster seat and into the child’s back, passing through his liver, lung and heart. He was already lifeless, minutes later, when an off-duty police officer found him bleeding on the side of the 55 Freeway near his screaming mother and tried to revive him.
When investigators caught up to 24-year-old Marcus Eriz after an intensive 16-day manhunt, he said that the Chevrolet’s driver, Aiden’s mother, had flipped him off in traffic. But he otherwise offered scant insight as to why he took hold of his 9-millimeter semiautomatic gun and fired into a stranger’s car that morning in May 2021.
“I just grabbed my gun for some reason ... shot at them,” Eriz told an interrogator, according to a transcript presented in Orange County Superior Court on Thursday, where Eriz is on trial facing
charges of second-degree murder and shooting at a motor vehicle.
“This is not a road rage case,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Daniel Feldman told jurors in his opening statement, but rather about the defendant’s “callous and total disregard for human life.”
The shooting resulted from “a momentary lapse of reason by a 24-year-old guy who had very little life experience,” Deputy Public Defender Randall Bethune told jurors Thursday.
“The man who confesses was aware of the consequences,” he said, but “the man who pulled the trigger” was not. After the shooting, Eriz’s girlfriend asked why he’d done it. “He didn’t have a good answer as to why he did what he did, right then,” Bethune said. “He just didn’t have an answer.”
Eriz went to work unaware that he had killed the boy, the defense attorney said, describing him as “a 24-year-old guy who likes to play video games and watch YouTube” rather than follow the news, which left him in the dark for days about what he’d done.
When he found out, the defense attorney said, he didn’t turn himself in because he was “frozen with fear,” though he did not get rid of the gun or flee the area.
“He’s not a monster,” Bethune told jurors. “He’s just a young guy who made a mistake.”
