202003.05
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Orange County man accused of killing drug dealer he agreed to protect

by in News

A man who was supposed to provide muscle for a friend collecting a drug debt instead betrayed him and slashed his throat, a prosecutor alleged Thursday during the opening of a murder trial.

John Ramon Breceda, 40, is facing murder and arson charges after prosecutors allege he stabbed 44-year-old Floriberto Villasenor Cortes to death in a Costa Mesa neighborhood in May 2015 and then torched Cortes’ car in San Juan Capistrano to hide evidence.

During opening statements Thursday morning in a Santa Ana courtroom, both the prosecution and defense told jurors that Cortes, a drug dealer, had asked Breceda to come with him to collect money Cortes was owed by a Costa Mesa man.

Cortes was “not a good drug dealer” because he would give clients the drugs up front, then try to get the money later, Senior Deputy District Attorney Heather Brown told jurors.

“That business decision cost him his life,” Brown said. “The man charged with protecting him, coming along to be his muscle, turned on him. Why he turned on him I can’t tell you. I don’t think we will ever know.”

Police have said they suspect Breceda attacked Cortes in a parked car. During his opening statement, Breceda’s attorney, Tom Nocella, did not outline what he believed led to Cortes’ death.

“It was not a murder that occurred in that car,” Nocella told jurors.

A man setting up for a yard sale spotted Cortes running down the street and then collapsing in a pool of blood, a gaping gash on the side of his neck.

Neighbors told officers that one man had been chasing another, with one getting into a vehicle and speeding off, leaving a sun visor in the street.

The burned remains of the vehicle, which officers later tied to Cortes, was discovered in a field near the I-5 Freeway and Junipero Serra Road in San Juan Capistrano. Meanwhile, detectives tied bloody fingerprints on the sun visor to Breceda, Brown said.

A room key for an Anaheim motel found near Cortes’ body was traced to Maricela Raye Gomez-Lee, an on-and-off girlfriend of Breceda’s. Surveillance footage from the motel showed Cortes and Breceda walking in and out of the same room.

Gomez-Lee was initially charged with being an accessory to murder. Brown told jurors that Gomez-Lee has since been granted immunity and has told prosecutors that she went with Breceda to get a knife prior to the fatal stabbing.

It isn’t the first time that Breceda has been charged with murder.

In 2011, Breceda pleaded guilty to his role in the 1994 killing of Valentina Giles Roque, 55.

In that killing, prosecutors said that Breceda and Manuel Rojas were loitering outside a Santa Ana apartment complex when Roque asked them to leave.

Breceda gave Rojas a handgun and told him to shoot Roque, according to prosecutors. Rojas did, in the chest, and she collapsed and died before her 24-year-old son and her daughter-in-law.

Rojas and Breceda both confessed to detectives in the days after the shooting, but neither was charged at the time because ballistics tests on a handgun confiscated from Rojas were inconclusive.

It wasn’t until 15 years later that a Santa Ana police ballistics expert using new technology matched the bullet that killed Roque the gun Rojas used.

By then, Rojas was already serving a three-strikes life prison term for robbery convictions.

The case was complicated by the fact that both men were boys when the slaying occurred, but in their 30s by the time they were charged.

Because the 1994 killing came a year before state law changed to allow juveniles to be charged as adults, prosecutors in 2013 were forced to prosecute Rojas and Breceda in Orange County Juvenile Court. And because juvenile court loses jurisdiction over its minors after they turn 25, their convictions led to no additional legal penalty.