Man stands trial for 83-year-old's fatal shooting

EDINBURG — The Diaz family thought for a moment that they had escaped from the hail of bullets unscathed.

Hoping to protect his family from the gunman who had cut them off and opened fire on their Chrysler 300 sedan, Jesus Mario Diaz ducked down and peeled away from his attacker in reverse. His wife, Modesta, crouched on the floorboard of the passenger seat as shots were fired around them.

In the frantic moments that followed, the couple was so relieved to find that neither had been hurt that they forgot about the 83-year-old woman - Modesta Diaz's mother - riding in the back seat.

"She said, ‘I got shot,'" Diaz recalled for jurors in Spanish on Tuesday. "I told her, ‘Mommy, it was a firecracker' - so she wouldn't be scared. She said, ‘No mija, I was hit.'"

Within an hour, Elena Ayala was dead.

Modesta Diaz's emotional testimony came during the first day of the capital murder trial of the only man since charged in her mother's death.

Ricardo Lopez, 25, did not pull the trigger and was not even at the crime scene the night of June 8, 2008. But prosecutors say they can prove he orchestrated the attack in an attempt to steal valuable wheel rims from the Diazes' vehicle.

Hidalgo County sheriff's deputies arrested Lopez on Sept. 14 - more than three months after the grandmother's fatal shooting.

The incident - which occurred near the intersection of Monte Cristo and Depot roads in Edinburg - initially stumped investigators because the attack appeared to have been completely random.

No one in the Diaz family knew Lopez or had any established criminal history, Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Treviño said at the time.

But when deputies eventually tracked the crime back to him, he voluntarily provided them with the .40-caliber pistol used in the crime. He had wrapped it in a newspaper and buried in his yard, according to court documents filed in his case.

Lopez, however, never admitted any involvement or identified the shooter, prosecutors said.

Investigators believe Lopez sent at least two other men out on a mission to find and steal rims from a Chrysler 300 - an order that led them randomly to the Diaz family. But no other suspects have been identified or arrested in the case.

On Tuesday, Lopez's defense team maintained that their client's reluctance to talk stemmed from the fact that he didn't know anything about Ayala's death.

"Did this man have somebody steal rims for him?" his lawyer, Rene Flores, said. "I believe the evidence will show that he didn't."

For Modesta Diaz, though, establishing who ordered the attack won't change the outcome. As she recalled the June night last year for jurors, heaving sobs often interrupted her testimony.

She described her trepidation as the dark Jeep Cherokee pulled up beside her family's car and cut them off, the shock when the masked man emerged from the backseat pointing a pistol through their windshield, and the confusion as emergency technicians later wheeled her mother off on a gurney.

"I arrived at the hospital 10 minutes later," she said. "And that's when everything went bad."

Lopez is charged under the law of parties - a Texas statute that holds accomplices just as responsible as the actual perpetrators of a crime. If convicted, he could face up to life in prison; prosecutors are not seeking the death penalty.

Testimony in his trial is expected to resume today and last through the end of the week.

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Jeremy Roebuck covers courts and general assignments for The Monitor. You can reach him at (956) 683-4437.