01-12-2017, 10:14 PM
(04-21-2015, 02:10 PM)username Wrote: He sure has let himself go.
Definitely a strange case but if he is truly schizophrenic, there might not be any rational motive. The drugs? I dunno.
It's so weird. Three years later, and it still seems like the whole story hasn't been told. In any case, Mercado spared the state the cost of a death penalty trial and the mandatory appeals of a capital conviction by pleading guilty today. The judge handed down three life sentences with no possibility of parole.
The latest:
A San Diego man who killed three people outside a Mission Valley mall on Christmas Eve in 2013 didn’t know his victims, a prosecutor said Thursday.
But that didn’t stop Carlo Mercado from shooting each of them in the head in what was described as a “road rage or carjacking” incident that turned deadly.
More than three years after the shootings, Mercado, 31, admitted in San Diego Superior Court that he killed the first of the victims — Gianni Belvedere — after arguing with him in the mall parking lot and then took his car.
When Mercado returned to the scene less than two hours later, he unexpectedly ran into Belvedere’s younger brother, Salvatore, and Ilona Flint, Gianni’s fiancée.
“They confronted me because I had Gianni Belvedere’s car,” the defendant admitted in a written statement.
Deputy District Attorney Brian Erickson said several theories about possible motives for the killings had circulated publicly over the years, and he took some time at the sentencing hearing to make one point clear: This was a random act of violence.
“Gianni, Salvatore and Ilona had nothing to do with their demise,” the prosecutor said. “This could have been any one of us in that parking lot. It literally is being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“I still have questions,” Judge Link said, referring to what occurred in the shopping mall parking lot the night of Dec. 23, 2013, and early the next morning.
“It’s just too bad that Mr. Mercado doesn’t wish to say everything,” Link said. “Maybe someday he will.”
Full story: http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news...story.html