Six months at youth camp for murder? DA and family of Santana Row teen stabbing victim reject possibility
The minute-long video clip from a surveillance camera at Santana Row is grainy and silent, but it showed just enough for David Gutierrez’s aunt, sitting in the small courtroom at Santa Clara County Juvenile Hall, to let out a piercing wail.
The footage, shown publicly in court for the first time last week, stops before the 15-year-old is stabbed to death, allegedly by an even younger boy.
But it affirmed what David’s family had always believed — the teen did nothing to provoke his attackers, who surrounded him as he fiddled on his phone at an outdoor patio where he and his date awaited their Valentine’s Day dinner reservation. Police say his attackers saw the crimson jacket he wore for the romantic occasion as a rival gang color, though he had no such affiliation. The video showed the youngest, a 13-year-old charged with David’s murder, throwing the first punch, and his friends piling on the blows.
“I feel like they were ripping my heart apart,” David’s aunt, Diana Gutierrez, said after watching the rain of punches on a courtroom screen during the trial of three of the teenagers, 16 at the time, charged in juvenile court with assault. They all have denied the charges.
The family was making funeral arrangements at the mortuary when they learned the news that would turn their heartbreak into activism: Because the boy accused of killing David was just 13 at the time, he would face no more than six to eight months at a youth rehabilitation ranch if convicted.
“That was the worst nightmare for me,” said David’s mother, who declined to identify herself publicly in fear of gang retaliation. “To try to comprehend that this is the law and that we just have to accept it — I’m not going to accept it.”
That’s when the entire family resolved to fight for tougher penalties for juvenile offenders.
But who would listen?
With a bullhorn in hand, Gutierrez — a 27-year-old cosmetology student — staged protests from Santana Row to Sacramento, often rallying two dozen friends and family as early as 7:30 a.m. David’s 21-year-old cousin, Michelle Gutierrez, printed T-shirts. The family held a Zoom meeting with state Sen. Dave Cortese and even persuaded San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan and Police Chief Paul Joseph to visit their home so they could express their frustrations.
This past week, they learned their efforts were finally gaining traction.
Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen agreed that six to eight months at a youth ranch for a teen convicted in a fatal stabbing is not enough, and he plans to fight for more.
“A teenager murdering another teenager and being released while still a teenager is not justice — full stop,” Rosen told the Bay Area News Group in an interview. “And you’re not rehabilitating the offender in a few months, and you’re not holding them accountable.”
No trial date has been set in the murder case. The teenager, whose name has been withheld by the courts because he is a minor, has denied the charges. His defense lawyers did not return messages Friday, but he may claim self-defense. According to a police affidavit, David’s girlfriend told police that when David encountered the 13-year-old after the others ran off, he was upset and demanded to fight “one on one.” The teen declined, saying he already got his “hits in,” the affidavit said, but when David pressed him, he took out his folding knife and stabbed David three times.
If the judge determines the teen murdered David, Rosen said he plans to recommend that he spend seven to 10 years incarcerated at Santa Clara County Juvenile Hall in the “secure track” program that would offer education and other programs. But offenders must be 14 to be eligible, and the accused boy was 13 when the crime occurred.
If the boy’s defense lawyer balks, Rosen said he will appeal. If the judge denies the appeal, “then I would seek legislation that allows for a longer period of confinement,” he said. But that would be too late for this case.
Rosen’s intent to escalate the issue could be yet another test case of the juvenile justice system that has swung from one extreme to the other over the past four decades. Too many young criminals were treated as adults in the 1980s and ’90s, he said, and too few face real consequences now.
“I’m interested in legislation that helps bring the pendulum closer to the center — a little more of an emphasis on accountability for the minor as a way of rehabilitating the minor,” said Rosen, who doesn’t always support stiffer sentences for criminals. He was one of three district attorneys to support the controversial Proposition 47, which reduced certain nonviolent felonies to misdemeanors.
David’s family said they were heartened to have an ally in Rosen.
“It means a lot that he is willing to fight with us,” Diana Gutierrez said.
But keeping the teenager in Juvenile Hall for years still isn’t enough for them. They want the boy accused in David’s murder to be treated as an adult — something Rosen doesn’t support — and plan to embark on an ambitious campaign to amend Proposition 57 that was approved by voters in 2016. As they write on their protest signs, “Adult Crime, Adult Consequences.”
In California, however, minors can’t be tried as adults if they are under age 16, and as Proposition 57 notes, only judges, not prosecutors, have the discretion to decide whether to transfer 16- and 17-year-olds to adult court depending on the severity of the crime.
Along with the suspect charged with David’s murder, now 14, in Juvenile Hall and the three on trial for his assault, who are now 16 and 17, the fifth teenager police say was also involved in the beating is 18 and faces felony assault charges in adult court. They, too, have denied the charges. If Judge Andrea Flint finds they are true, however, the teens could be sent to the youth ranch or face the “secure track” incarceration at Juvenile Hall since they are older than 14. Their lawyers have all declined to comment.
Raj Jayadev, coordinator of DeBug, the San Jose civil rights community organization focusing on criminal justice reform, said there are good reasons not to charge even serious youth offenders as adults.
“There needs to be an emphasis on rehabilitative possibilities,” Jayadev said. “Treating young people within the juvenile system rather than the adult system is allowing for that, versus treating young people as adults and then essentially throwing their lives away.”
It’s difficult for David’s family to be sympathetic to the young attackers when their own loved one’s life was so senselessly ended. The devout Catholic family keeps a memorial to him in the living room of their Peninsula home — an altar in his memory with candles and flowers and photos of the Sequoia High School sophomore who loved to share special meals he cooked at home with his friends at school and train young boxers at the gym when the coach was away.
In a portrait on the wall taken after a boxing tournament, David is wearing a long gold necklace his parents gave him for his 15th birthday — a recognition, his mother said, of the fine young man he had become, a good student who was frequently complimented by his teachers.
The video played in court shows what appears to be one of the attackers yanking it off his neck. Assistant District Attorney Allyson Ortega, who is trying the case, paused the recording so the judge could see David’s head jerk for a moment when the chain snapped off. The family hoped for its return, to place it on the living room altar. But police never found it.
Marc Klaas, who became an advocate for the “three-strikes law” after his 12-year-old daughter Polly was kidnapped and killed in Petaluma in 1993 by repeat criminal Richard Allen Davis, said he sympathizes with the family’s need to change the system.
“I doubt that there’s any joy in the activism that they’re doing,” he said, “but I think that there is therapy in it.”
For Diana Gutierrez, it’s all she can do.
“David needs to mean something,” she said. “He was too big, too bright, too special for it to just end there. There’s just no way it’s going to end there.”