Prospero Guadarrama, Baby-Faced Gang Banger, Gets Life for Executing Rivals

​Baby-faced gang banger Prospero Guadarrama was sentenced today to life in state prison without the possibility of parole for murdering two rivals and leaving a third in a coma after an execution-style gang shooting eight days before Christmas 2006. Sixteen at the time of the shootings, Guadarrama was tried as an adult and convicted by a jury last month of two felony counts of special circumstances murder for the benefit of a criminal street gang, one felony count of attempted murder, and one felony count of street terrorism.

The sentencing enhancements for criminal street gang activity and the vicarious discharge of a firearm as a gang member causing death and bodily injury were also found true for Guadarrama, who is now 21 and the sixth defendant to be convicted and sentenced in the case.

On Dec. 17, 2006, Guadarrama joined fellow gang members Juan Roldan, Norberto Hernandez, Oiram Ayala and Angel Garcia on a murder ride with Marco Perez behind the wheel. Their cargo included two firearms. They stopped in a rival gang neighborhood and eventually before 14-year-old Angel Secundino, 15-year-old Gabriel Perez and 16-year-old Fernando Garcia. Secundino and Gabriel Perez were killed on the spot execution-style with head shots. Garcia, who was shot in the stomach, was left in a coma and would go on to have seven surgeries. His attackers split.

Besides that grisly crime, three of those convicted in the same case as Guadarrama were part of a gang-related shooting two days earlier. On Dec. 15, 2006, Ayala, Hernandez, and Roldan exchanged gunfire with a group of gang rivals. Gumaro Rojas, then a 47-year-old street vendor selling corn on the cob from a cart, took a shot to his back in the crossfire. The bullet penetrated his spinal cord, and he remains paralyzed from the waist down to this day.