WOODLAND — Those who knew Ronald “Tony” Antonio describe him as someone who would give you the shirt off his back. Yolo County prosecutors say it was that very act of generosity that got him killed.
“He was just a good guy,” Jayme Stewart, manager of Woodland’s Casa del Sol trailer park where Antonio lived with his ailing father, testified this week in Yolo Superior Court. “He didn’t have any problems. He was a good, low-key resident.”
But trouble found Antonio on the night of Aug. 30, 2016, when, according to prosecutors, two Woodland gang members “on the hunt” for victims killed the 41-year-old tire shop employee — one holding him in place while the other stabbed him twice in the torso, the wounds severing his aorta, breaking a rib and damaging internal organs.
Antonio lived only minutes longer, spilling a blood trail down the street as he stumbled to a neighbor’s trailer in search of help. He made it to the front door and knocked before losing consciousness and falling backwards, dying at the foot of the stairs.
Alexis Ivan Velasquez, 19, and Justin Mathew Gonzalez, 23, are now on trial for murder, accused of carrying out the killing to elevate their status in Woodland’s Vario Bosque Norte — a subset of the Norteño street gang.
A third defendant, 26-year-old Ruby Morning Feather Aradoz, is being tried alongside them on criminal street gang charges. Prosecutors say she triggered the violence that night by accusing Antonio of injuring her within earshot of the two men.
“He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. … That is why he was murdered that night,” Deputy District Attorney Michael Vroman, trying the case alongside District Attorney Jeff Reisig, told jurors in his opening statement this week.
All three defendants have pleaded not guilty, their attorneys telling the seven-man, five-woman jury hearing the case that it isn’t as neat and tidy as the prosecution theory makes it appear.
“There’s going to be provocation, I submit to you,” said Roberto Marquez, whose client Velasquez is suspected of delivering the fatal wounds. The attorneys for Gonzalez and Aradoz, meanwhile, have disputed their alleged roles in Antonio’s death.
“What, if anything, did my client have to do with what happened to him moments later?” said Jeff Raven, Aradoz’s lawyer.
The defense also has cast doubt on the case’s key witness, who told police she observed Velasquez and Gonzalez attack Antonio.
Two others who are charged in the crime, Malinda Joy Collins and Cynthia Maria Tello, are scheduled to be tried separately next month.
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By all accounts, Antonio’s evening started out typically enough. After calling it a day at Big O Tires in Woodland, he went home and walked his dog, both he and his pet well-known among residents of the East Street trailer park.
Later, he met up with a friend from a neighboring trailer, and they decided to head to a nearby bar for a game of pool.
Surveillance video from the Casa del Sol front office shows the two men walking down Fiesta Street when they encounter Aradoz, who is bleeding from a cut to her arm from an earlier altercation with a man on a bicycle.
“You will see how Ronald Antonio gives her the shirt off his back to help stop the bleeding,” Vroman said as the scene played out on a screen behind him. Elsewhere in the neighborhood, he added, Velasquez and Gonzalez searched for rival or former gang members, “looking to inflict violence.”
As Antonio walked away from Aradoz, another neighbor out dumping his trash noticed the commotion and asked her if she needed help.
“No — you did this to me, you f—ing scrap,” Aradoz replied, according to Isaiah Magaña, whom an intoxicated Aradoz apparently mistook for the man who had wounded her arm.
Though he has no gang affiliations of his own, Magaña said he’s well aware that “scrap” is a derogatory term for the Norteños’ rival Sureño gang.
According to Magaña, Aradoz punctuated her words by flashing a small pocket knife, prompting Magaña to turn and run. As he fled down the street, he heard a man shout “Bosque” — “a sign of fear,” he called it — and saw two young Hispanic men chasing after him.
Magaña said that as he ran, he encountered Antonio and instructed him to run and hide. As Antonio ran toward home on Waterfall Lane, Magaña veered right toward a relative’s trailer, where he called 911.
In court, Magaña said he couldn’t identify either of his pursuers that night or to this day. He also admitted being nervous, and started to weep on the witness stand as he expressed his fear that one of the defendants’ relatives might “go to my house where my child is, and hurt my family and myself.”
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But another witness did place Velasquez and Gonzalez at the scene. Raquel Ponce-Perez told jurors she went out to get her mail when she encountered a white van with two women who were arguing inside.
“Don’t go there, Nina,” one of them said, Ponce-Perez testified through a Spanish-language interpreter. Later, she saw a Caucasian woman standing on the corner near a park, yelling that “there was a piece of s— there and they should come for him.”
Ponce-Perez recalled that she looked around and saw two young men, one armed with a knife, “running in the direction that she was telling them to. … I saw Tony trying to get to his home. At that point, (the woman) pointed to him and said, “That’s the piece of s—.”
The witness said she stood frozen in place as the two men cornered Antonio outside of his trailer.
“One of the young men grabbed Tony from behind. They were struggling, and Tony was trying to get away from him,” Ponce-Perez said. “The one who had the weapon grabbed him and gave it to him two times — two stabs.”
Asked to identify the assailants in court, Ponce-Perez pointed out Velasquez as the stabber and Gonzalez as the person who held Antonio still with a bear hug. Both passed her as they fled the scene, coming within a foot of her, she said.
Under the prosecution’s questioning, Ponce-Perez admitted to past criminal conduct — a welfare-fraud conviction and animal cruelty arrest — that the defense later used to question her credibility. She also acknowledged receiving assistance from law enforcement to move out of the trailer park and to pursue a U visa that would allow her to remain in the United States.
The defense also focused on inconsistencies in Ponce-Perez’s prior statements, including her claim in court that she “never left (Antonio’s) side” as he lay dying, though she told police she had followed the assailants as they ran toward their own trailer.
Gonzalez’s attorney, Keith Staten, noted that police reports indicate Ponce-Perez had trouble identifying Gonzalez to officers shortly after the stabbing, and in a photo lineup shown to her the following day.
“Maybe because he was not in those photos,” Ponce-Perez replied, adding that if police reports say her ID was hesitant, they’re wrong.
“It’s something that I’ve been living with all this year. It was a real trauma for me,” Ponce-Perez said. “They are faces that I can’t forget.”
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8048. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenkeene