After 12 hours of deliberations over three days, a jury convicted two men on Feb. 27 of first-degree murder in the shooting death of a Point Loma man who contacted them via a Snapchat app.
The mother of Eduardo Salguero, 18, was in the audience to hear the guilty verdicts against Angel Garcia, 20, and Armando Silvestre Alvarado, 21, both of San Diego.
The seven-man, five-woman jury found the special circumstance true that both men committed a murder during a robbery, which means they will both be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Neither Garcia nor Alvarado had any reaction to the verdicts as they sat with their attorneys following a trial that began on Feb. 6. They wore suits during the trial and did not testify.
Both men were found guilty of robbing Salguero and trying to murder Ruben, a 17-year-old boy who came with Salguero who had answered their Snapchat advertisement to buy a ghost gun, which ironically was the murder weapon.
Alvarado was found guilty of firing a shot at the Vons grocery store at 3645 Midway Drive. No one was injured by that shot and jurors found Garcia was not guilty of that charge. The incident took place on Nov. 25, 2020, behind the Vons store at 6 p.m.
Additionally, Garcia was convicted of robbing a man in Mission Beach at gunpoint on Nov. 6, 2020. The man lost his cell phone, wallet, and cash.
San Diego Superior Court Judge Kimberlee Lagotta set sentencing for May 23. Both Alvarado and Garcia remain in jail without bail.
“I’m happy the family got some closure,” said Deputy District Attorney Miriam Hemming afterward. “They can’t get Eduardo back.”
Jurors deadlocked over a charge of attempted robbery of Ruben for both men, and Lagotta declared a mistrial on that count.
Defense attorneys asked jurors to acquit both men of murder and robbery, saying Ruben pulled out a BB gun that looked like a real gun and it caused both men to fire shots. Defense attorneys said it was not a robbery, and that Salguero had planned to rob them.
After Alvarado was arrested, he told some investigators dressed as inmates in a holding cell that “the passenger took it(gun) out and I pulled mine out faster.”
Jurors did not linger afterward to discuss their verdicts with any of the attorneys.
After Ruben pulled out the BB gun, he jumped out of Salguero’s car and ran off. Garcia shot Salguero in the back, said Hemming, causing him to slump over the driver’s seat.
“They shot Eduardo Salguero in the back like cowards,” said Hemming in her rebuttal argument.
The car propelled forward into a wall. Garcia hit his head into the windshield, leaving his DNA in blood and hair behind, said the prosecutor. Alvarado fled, but left his cell phone behind, which included a message from Garcia on it.
Both Garcia and Alvarado will likely face some extra years tacked onto their life without parole sentence for their robbery and attempted murder convictions, said Hemming.
