Accused triple murderer Edwin Ramos returned to the stand on Tuesday, and faced the prosecutor’s examination rather than the gentle questions of his sympathetic defense attorney [1].
Ramos performed poorly, despite having nearly four years to rehearse his lies. His fumbling responses to questions illustrated his low intelligence, which was also shown by his inability to discern an American father and sons from fellow foreign gangsters as murder targets.
Prosecutor presses Ramos on his changing story [2], San Francisco Chronicle, April 11, 2012
A prosecutor questioned the credibility Tuesday of a gang member who denied at his triple-murder trial that he fired the shots in 2008 that killed a man and two of his sons on a San Francisco street.
Prosecutor Harry Dorfman prodded at Edwin Ramos’ varying accounts of what happened June 22, 2008, the day Tony Bologna, 48, and his sons Michael, 20, and Matthew, 16, were shot and killed in their car on their way back to their Excelsior neighborhood home from a family outing.
Dorfman pointed out that Ramos, 25, began his interview with police inspectors three days after the shootings by denying he had even been in San Francisco on the Sunday afternoon when the Bolognas were killed. Ramos now says that he was driving the car from which the actual killer opened fire, and that the shootings came as a surprise to him.
The prosecutor repeatedly asked Ramos to give his definition of a lie and his reasons for telling different versions of what happened.
“You will lie if you think the truth will hurt you?” Dorfman demanded.
Ramos befuddled
Ramos looked taken aback by the direction of the cross-examination and said he didn’t understand some of the questions. At times he appeared incredulous and smiled as he addressed serious subjects, something he explained Monday was a nervous habit.Prosecutors say Ramos opened fire from a car on the Bologna family after mistaking one of the men for a rival in a gang whose members had shot and wounded a friend earlier that day.
None of the Bolognas was a gang member, and a son who survived the attack, Andrew Bologna, now 21, has testified that Ramos fired the fatal shots.
Different gunman
Ramos testified Monday in San Francisco Superior Court that he had been driving the car at the time of the attack, but that it was a leader of the Pasadena Locos Sureños gang, Wilfredo “Flaco” Reyesruano, who had reached over him and shot through an open window. He said that Reyesruano had been acting erratically and that he hadn’t known the gang leader was armed.Ramos said he hadn’t reported Reyesruano to police because he was afraid of what might become of his wife and young daughter.
” ‘If they (police) get to you, you know what we can do to your family,’ ” he said Reyesruano had told him. “I got scared. I saw a different side of him.”
Reyesruano’s whereabouts are unknown, though a friend of his testified earlier in the 3-month-old trial that he had fled to South Carolina after the killings.
Dorfman told Ramos he might have been able to ensure his family’s safety by telling police where to find Reyesruano before he left town.
Other discrepancies
The prosecutor also pointed out discrepancies between Ramos’ testimony and what he told police. For example, Dorfman said, Ramos told the jury that Reyesruano had been in his car because they were on their way to see their wounded gang friend in the hospital, a potentially sympathy-grabbing detail that he didn’t relate to police.He also told police in 2008 that Reyesruano always carried a gun, but testified that he had no idea he had a gun at the time of the shooting, Dorfman said.
Ramos said police had interviewed him in the middle of the night and that he probably hadn’t been completely awake at the time.
“I can tell you I did (lie), but I can’t say why,” he said.
The prosecutor also pressed Ramos on his testimony that he had been trying to escape gang life. Dorfman noted that cell phone records show Ramos communicated with Reyesruano more than 800 times in the five weeks before the killings and had contacts with other gang members.
Ramos said many of those calls were related to drug deals. Gang members called him repeatedly looking for cocaine and marijuana, said Ramos, who admitted he helped support his family by dealing.
Dorfman is scheduled to continue his cross-examination Wednesday.