WOODLAND — A swift and grisly stabbing death inside a Woodland bar last December did not amount to murder, ruled a Yolo County jury, which convicted the defendant of voluntary manslaughter Friday following a two-week trial and full day of deliberations.
Jeffrey Lemus, 55, showed no visible reaction as a Yolo Superior Court clerk read the verdicts acquitting him of both first- and second-degree murder for the Dec. 5, 2015, stabbing of his rival Kelly Mason Choate inside Kenny’s Bar & Grill on East Street.
But emotions ran high in the courtroom gallery’s front row, where Choate’s relatives and friends wept as they heard the jury’s decision.
“We had something to fight for, and now that it’s over and I didn’t get the charge I was hoping for, it takes you two steps back from getting closure,” said Kasie Choate, the victim’s daughter. “I know my dad wasn’t a perfect person, but I know in my heart that he would never have done what Jeff’s done.”
She expressed gratitude that there’s some prison time in store for Lemus, who faces up to an 11-year term at his July 7 sentencing hearing.
Lemus’ attorney, Deputy Public Defender Ron Johnson, declined to comment on the verdicts. Deputy District Attorney Kyle Hasapes, meanwhile, said his focus remains on Choate’s family.
“I just hope they know that I did everything that I could,” Hasapes said.
The prosecutor had sought a verdict of first-degree murder, saying Lemus killed the 53-year-old Choate willfully, deliberately and with premeditation after Choate cursed and disrespected him on the Kenny’s bar patio that December night.
“That was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Hasapes said during his closing argument Thursday of the men’s long-running feud, which began over a stolen bike and led to occasional verbal sparring. “He didn’t want to take it anymore.”
Hasapes alleged that Lemus walked into the bar and tried baiting Choate into the bathroom with the intent of killing him there. But when that didn’t work, he again goaded Choate and stabbed him in the barroom doorway — the horrifying scene caught on multiple security cameras.
Lemus has maintained he acted in self-defense, telling The Davis Enterprise during a jailhouse interview two days after the fatal attack that Choate was known to carry a fishing knife and had brandished it at others in the past.
“In my mind I’m thinking, if I don’t get him, he’s going to get me,” Lemus said of the men’s final altercation, in which punches were thrown before Lemus stabbed Choate with a large folding knife that pierced the victim’s heart and lung and severed a rib.
Choate didn’t pull out his own knife until after he was mortally wounded. But one witness testified that Choate delivered an ominous warning as he entered the bar, telling Lemus, “I’m going to get you, motherf—–. It’s your time.”
“By any stretch of the imagination, that’s a threat. It’s not taken any other way,” Johnson told the six-man, six-woman jury during his closing remarks.
The jury received the case late Thursday afternoon and deliberated most of the day Friday — at one point asking a question that sought clarification between second-degree murder and the “heat of passion” theory for voluntary manslaughter.
A short time later, the verdict was in.
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8048. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenkeene