WOODLAND — Ruby Aradoz admits she was blackout drunk on vodka the night a homicide went down at the Casa del Sol trailer park in Woodland.
But despite her intoxication, she says she has no doubt she saw two alleged gang members attack victim Ronald Antonio on Aug. 30, 2016.
“I was absolutely terrified,” Aradoz, 26, testified Monday in Yolo Superior Court, moments after pointing out Alexis Ivan Velazquez and Justin Matthew Gonzalez as the suspects in Antonio’s fatal stabbing.
“It’s a horrible experience to learn that you’re there during a time that someone’s been murdered,” she said.
Just last week, Aradoz herself had been a defendant in the homicide case, charged with criminal street gang activity. She initially avoided arrest but was indicted by the Yolo County grand jury after testifying before the panel in October 2016.
Prosecutors have alleged Aradoz triggered the assault by accusing another man of cutting her arm in an earlier altercation, around the corner from where Velazquez and Gonzalez were “on the hunt” for violence in the East Street trailer park.
But Velazquez and Gonzalez mistook Antonio for the other man and chased him down, Velazquez stabbing him twice in the torso while Gonzalez held him in place, prosecutors say.
Aradoz made a plea deal Friday, five days into the trial, agreeing to testify for the prosecution after pleading no contest to being an accessory to a felony. Her case ultimately will be dismissed if her testimony is deemed truthful.
Velazquez, 19; and Gonzalez, 23; both are charged with murder and gang activity, accused of killing Antonio to elevate their status in Woodland’s Vario Bosque Norte street gang. Both have pleaded not guilty.
Two others charged in the case, Malinda Joy Collins and Cynthia Maria Tello, are slated to be tried separately later this month.
Aradoz said she had gone to Casa del Sol that night with two friends to get some food, though she wasn’t friendly with the residents of the trailer they planned to visit.
So Aradoz waited for her companions outside, striking up a conversation with a man on a bike near the trailer park’s playground.
“The next thing I remember is he was taking off on his bike and I was bleeding from my right arm,” Aradoz recalled, describing a 4- to 5-inch gash on her forearm. “I’m pretty sure it was him. He was the only guy around.”
As she walked down the street in search of help, Aradoz encountered two other men — Antonio and his neighbor — who according to prior testimony were headed to a local bar to play a game of pool.
Aradoz asked Antonio for his shirt, and he promptly gave it to her. She had never seen him before, she said.
“He was just a random guy that was out there, and he gave me the shirt off his back to stop the bleeding,” Aradoz said. “The next thing I remember is there being a whole lot of commotion.”
Last week, Casa del Sol resident Isaiah Magaña testified that he had been taking out his trash that night when he saw the injured Aradoz and asked if she needed help. He said Aradoz replied, “No — you did this to me, you f—ing scrap.”
“Scrap,” jurors learned, is a derogative term for a member of the Sureño gang, a rival of the Norteños.
But Aradoz said she doesn’t remember anything about her run-in with Magaña. Instead, she recalled seeing “Oso” — Velazquez’s nickname — running down the street and calling her name, at one point holding a large kitchen knife.
“We were all running down the street,” Aradoz said, referring to herself, Velazquez, Gonzalez and one of the female friends who accompanied her to the trailer park that night.
Around the corner, on Waterfall Lane, “everybody was jumping around, like a fight” while a man lay on the ground, Aradoz said. When District Attorney Jeff Reisig asked her who was involved, she replied, “the two boys here.”
“I later found out that somebody had been stabbed and killed,” Aradoz said, clarifying she didn’t witness the stabbing herself. But she recalled observing Velazquez standing over Antonio with a knife, and said she saw Gonzalez holding another knife a short time later.
“They just looked so angry,” she said.
A tire shop employee with no gang ties, Antonio, 41, died minutes after the stabbing, leaving a blood trail along the street before falling unconscious on the front steps of a neighbor’s trailer.
On cross-examination, Velazquez and Gonzalez’s defense attorneys grilled Aradoz on inconsistencies between her court testimony and her prior statements to police.
They also suggested she based her recollections on her review of surveillance video from the trailer park, given her inebriated state that night.
Aradoz admitted to withholding information from authorities, even downright lying, during her initial interview because she wanted no part of what occurred. But she contends she was forthcoming in subsequent statements and in her grand jury testimony, which Gonzalez’s lawyer noted makes no mention of his client ever having a knife.
“What I told you today was the truth,” Aradoz said.
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8048. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenkeene