2 men convicted of murder in 2015 killings of woman and girl in park in Montecito Heights area of LA

LOS ANGELES — Two young men were convicted Monday of first-degree murder for the killings of a 19-year-old woman and a 17-year-old girl at a park in Montecito Heights nearly a decade ago.

The downtown Los Angeles jury deliberated about three hours before returning its verdict in the case of Jose Antonio Echeverria — who was 19 at the time of the crime and is now 28 — and Dallas Stone Pineda, who was 17 at the time of the crimes and is now 27.

Jurors had been ordered to resume their deliberations anew twice —most recently Monday morning when a juror was excused and replaced with an alternate.

Along with the murder charges stemming from the October 2015 killings of 19-year-old Gabriela Calzada and 17-year-old Briana Gallegos, jurors found true the special circumstance allegations of murder while lying in wait and multiple murders.

Echeverria and Pineda are each facing sentences of life in prison without the possibility of parole, although Pineda is expected to eventually have an opportunity at parole because he was under 18 at the time of the crime.

Sentencing is set Dec. 11 before Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge George G. Lomeli.

The victims’ bodies were found by a woman walking her dog at 2:20 p.m. Oct. 28, 2015, and their deaths were quickly classified as homicides. Briana was reported missing about 9 p.m. the same day, roughly seven hours after the bodies were found near Mercury and Boundary avenues along a walking path through Ernest E. Debs Regional Park.

Then-Los Angeles Police Department Chief Charlie Beck said one of the victims — subsequently identified as Calzada — had been shot and that both had been beaten.

Police said shortly after the killings that the crime was the result of a long-running gang feud, with prosecutors saying that the two victims had grown up in a rival gang neighborhood and had a pre-existing friendship with the defendants.

Deputy District Attorney Stephen Lonseth told jurors last week that the panel had heard from the defendants’ “own words what they did to those girls … how they brutally beat and ended those two girls’ lives,” and maintained that everything that they told an undercover operative behind bars was true.

“This is cold. This is calculated. This is premeditated. This is atrocious,” he said, telling jurors that they lured the victims into a secluded area before “beating them to mush.”

In re-arguments before jurors last week, Deputy District Attorney David Ayvazian said there was no evidence presented that anyone else committed the murders.

“There are no other killers. There are only two and they’re sitting at this table,” he said.

Defense attorneys countered that their clients’ statements about the killings when they were in custody were false, with Echeverria’s attorney, Robert Harton, arguing that his client was placed into an intimidating position with a person who lied to the two defendants and was posing as a senior gang member.

Harton urged jurors not to use emotion or hatred to arrive at their verdict, saying that the defendants “were teenagers” and deserved a fair trial. He urged jurors to either acquit his client or find him guilty of one lesser count of second-degree murder, arguing that there were “two separate killings” that “happened at the same time.”

Pineda’s attorney, Mia Frances Yamamoto, argued that jurors should acquit her client of both killings.

“Dallas Pineda is not guilty of either murder,” she said, adding that her client’s comments to the undercover jailhouse operative were “all bogus” and “all fake.”