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Mexican - guns, drugs, break-ins


Mario Pinedo avoided deportation despite a drug conviction.
By Fernando Quintero, Rocky Mountain News
June 12, 2006
Mario Pinedo of Mexico wounded Apolonio Ramirez in a drive-by shooting six years ago, leaving him with no feeling in his left leg.

Ramirez's wife, Catherine, has lived with his pain as well as her own. She puts her hand over her heart at the memory of her brother, Daniel Trujillo, bludgeoned to death in his home in December 1996.

The couple's lives were turned upside-down by criminals — Pinedo, an illegal immigrant, and Trujillo's alleged killer, a suspected illegal immigrant. Pinedo had slipped through the immigration net that could have deported him. The other man slipped away into the night.

On July 4, 2000, Apolonio Ramirez was watching his grandchildren light fireworks in his front yard in south Denver. What he thought was the bang of a firecracker turned out to be gunfire.

Pinedo, of Ciudad Juarez, had opened fire from a car in the 400 block of South Stuart Street about 10 p.m. after someone yelled a gang slogan at him, police reports said.

Jose Reyes, who was with the man who yelled the slogan, was wounded in the face. Ramirez was hit in the leg as he ran into his garage and dived under his truck, bullets whizzing overhead.

Ramirez, pulling up his pant leg to reveal a 6-inch scar, said his doctor considered amputating his leg because of the nerve damage. He still has a bullet fragment lodged in his bone.

"I don't feel anything, except soreness when it's cold outside," he said.

After the shooting, Ramirez was out of work for eight months.

"We got behind financially. Our 17-year-old son dropped out of school. I didn't have any money to give him, and he had to get a part-time job," Ramirez said.

Police captured Pinedo on Aug. 23, 2000, after a tip from Catherine Ramirez. She said two neighborhood women told her Pinedo bragged about the shootings.

Drug convictions are supposed to be a sure bet for getting deported, but that wasn't the case for Pinedo. He had been sentenced to four years of community corrections in November 1999 after police found cocaine in a compartment on the roof of his car.

On Jan. 7, 2000, he was sentenced again to community corrections after he stole two compressors from a parked pickup on Lowell Boulevard. Ten days later, on Jan. 17, he walked away from the community corrections residential facility. He was not caught until that August after the drive-by shooting.

He was charged on Nov. 6, 2000, with attempted murder in the drive-by shootings. But corrections officials, unaware of those pending charges, put Pinedo into a minimum-security prison in Buena Vista.

He escaped with another inmate on Nov. 13, 2000. He fled to Mexico and was caught Dec. 1, trying to cross the border back into the U.S. at El Paso. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison in January 2003 for the July 4 shooting. He received an additional 18 months for theft in Jefferson County. He faces deportation when his sentence is completed.

It wasn't the first time the Ramirez family had been victimized. On Dec. 11, 1996, Catherine Ramirez found her younger brother slain at his home, which was right behind her house.

"There was blood everywhere," she said.

She's certain the killer was the charismatic young man taken in by Daniel Trujillo a few weeks earlier. Prosecutors said they have a warrant for the guest, Aaron Morales-Terrazas, who is believed to have fled to Mexico. His legal status couldn't be determined.

"Daniel was a good Samaritan," Catherine Ramirez said of her brother, who had been stricken with polio at a younger age. "He let the young man move in with him. He helped get him a job at McDonald's. And what did he get for his good deed? Murdered."

Ramirez even helped the man fill out his work application at McDonald's. It was then she noticed that he had fake documents.

"His picture on his identification wasn't his," she said.

She believes the man who killed Trujillo fled in the night in her brother's white 1988 Oldsmobile, which was missing when police arrived.

"My husband got justice, but my family hasn't," she said. "My brother didn't deserve to die. His killer doesn't deserve to roam free."