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Sandoval in 2007
Facts of the Crime:
Sentenced to death in Los Angeles County on May 9, 2003 in the April 29, 2000 murder of Long Beach Police Officer Daryle Black, 33. Black was dedicated to changing the lives of at-risk youth. Affable and well-liked, he had overcome a speech impairment related to a congenital mouth condition to become a Long Beach police officer in 1994. Vacations were spent helping people he had arrested; he concentrated on kids drawn into the gang life. So, his death at the hands of gang member Ramon Sandoval, Jr. was especially bitter for loved ones and colleagues. Black and his partner in the Gang Enforcement Division, Officer Rick Delfin, were ambushed as they sat in their patrol car on April 29, 2000.
Sandoval and a fellow Compton gang member, Miguel Camacho, had met to plan the retaliation shooting of a rival gang member in Long Beach that day. Sandoval had loaded an assault rifle with a 42-shot magazine, and the two had driven to Lime Avenue, where the rival was hosting a birthday party for a little girl. As Sandoval and Camacho walked on Lime, Black and Delfin's unmarked police car rolled to a stop, 15 feet away. The officers looked at Camacho, armed and on parole. Sandoval responded by firing 28 rounds, watching the officers' bodies jerk at the impacts. Black was killed instantly; Delfin's injuries ended his days of patrol work. The judge at Sandoval's trial said his poor but loving family had tried to get him to leave the gang life. But any mitigating circumstances in Sandoval's life were "substantially outweighed by the cold, vicious, heartless murder of Daryle Black," the judge said. At a news conference at the city's memorial for fallen police and firefighters, Police Chief Anthony Batts said Sandoval's death sentence would never bring back Black. "Justice has been served," the chief said, "but the debt has not been paid."
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