Latino gang member was sentenced to death twice, plus 358 years in prison for committing a hate crime

Latino gang member was sentenced to death twice, plus 358 years in prison for committing a hate crime that shook the city’s African-American population to its very foundation and jolted residents and religious and political leaders into the streets to demand an end to such gratuitous violence.
It was a Jim Crow-like killing. It was a crime that smacked of the dark days in America’s history when white people killed black people simply because they were black. The victims hadn’t done anything wrong and were usually unknown to their killers, but they were simply Black and, therefore, perfect fodder for shooting, lynching, beating, drowning, dragging, or whatever would provide the greatest rush to their killers.
That was the Jim Crow era.
This is not. Nevertheless, a shackled Latino, Jonathan Fajardo, 23, stood stoically in the downtown courtroom on Good Friday when Judge David Wesley sentenced him for “the cold and vicious murder” of 14-year-old African-American Cheryl Green as she stood on her skates in a driveway chatting with her friends near her Harbor Gateway home in December 2006.
A jury had already convicted Fajardo in September for the first-degree murders of Green and Christopher Ash, 25, a fellow gang member who witnessed the Green killing and whom Fajardo feared would rat him out. The jury also recommended that Fajardo receive the death penalty.
During the trial, Fajardo’s defense attorney argued that Green’s killing was an accident. The judge said, in effect, “I don’t think so,” and on Friday, Judge Wesley said he found Fajardo’s crimes to be “premeditated, willful and committed with malice aforethought,” and he threw every book at him he could find: He gave Fajardo one death sentence for each of the two lives he took and tacked on 358 years in prison for a number of attempted murder and other counts. Fajardo was convicted of the special circumstances that made him eligible for the death penalty in the first place, to wit: having committed multiple murders, having committed a hate crime based on race, having committed the crimes for a gang and having murdered of a witness.
The prosecutor, Gretchen Ford, argued, and the judge and jury agreed, that at the time of the murder, Fajardo was an 18-year-old member of the 204th Street Latino gang which preyed upon and terrorized African-Americans who lived in or visited the Harbor Gateway area. Ford presented this scenario: Smarting from an earlier run-in the gang had with an unknown Black man, Fajardo and his pals roamed the neighborhood looking for somebody black to shoot — anybody, just as long as he or she was Black. They came upon Green, an eighth grader at Steven White Middle School, and her friends hanging out in a residential driveway and Fajardo opened fire on them, killing Green.
The court found that two weeks after he killed Green and the LAPD had launched a full-court press to solve the crime, Fajardo feared fellow gangster Ash would tell the cops what he witnessed, so he stabbed Ash 62 times.
In an interview Tuesday, Ford agreed with observing legal experts’ assessment that Wesley’s “two death plus 358 years” sentence was the judge’s way of ensuring that, whichever way future winds blow on the issue of the death penalty in California, Fajardo will never leave prison alive.
In fact, Green’s killing was so heinous that it galvanized the community into unprecedented action. Councilwoman Janice Hahn, who represents Harbor Gateway, which is located in the southernmost tip of the city of Los Angeles, immediately took the lead in dealing with the matter. “This was the most emotional time for me during my tenure as councilwoman,” Hahn said. She formed a task force and led weekend marches through the neighborhood calling attention to the killing. She walked door-to-door with Green’s mother, Charlene Lovett, to implore parents to make their kids stop the violence, and in 2009 she created the Cheryl Green Community Center on donated land in Harbor Gateway as a memorial to the slain teenager and a place of peace for the local youngsters.
“The kids told me there was no place safe for them to go,” Hahn said. “There was one Boys and Girls Club, but it was in an area where these kids felt unsafe, so I established the new center closer to Cheryl’s home, which is being operated by the Boys and Girls Club of Harbor Gateway with which more than 90 young people are involved everyday,” Hahn said. “The sentencing of Cheryl Green’s killer will hopefully provide some closure to a community torn apart by gang violence,” the councilwoman continued. “The youth of Harbor Gateway now have other options to joining gang life. My hope is that the center will prevent them from getting involved in gangs in the first place,” Hahn said.
Cheryl’s mother, Lovett, is proud of the youth center that bears her daughter’s name. She is now relieved that Fajardo has been sentenced and “glad that it’s over and I don’t have to sit in the same room with her killer everyday,” Lovett said. “The trial lasted more than two months and I didn’t miss a single day,” the mother continued. “It was really hard hearing all the details about things I didn’t know. Her killer just sat there through the whole time and didn’t react to anything,” Lovett said. “He acted as if whatever was going on in the courtroom did not involve him.