The new LA District Attorney George Gascon won’t allow prosecutors to attend parole hearings for dangerous felons. As a result, one gang member who executed two teens in cold blood is going free. Another felon, a man who raped two small children, will probably get parole. Prosecutors are barred from his hearing too.
THE DOUBLE MURDERER
A gang member and double murderer convicted in the shooting and killing of two teenagers at a party in Los Angeles more than thirty years ago was found to be suitable for parole by the state at a hearing on Wednesday.
Howard Elwin Jones has been imprisoned at San Quentin state prison since 1991 for the December 1988 shooting and killing of 18-year-old Chris Baker and another boy at a party in Rowland Heights.
The prosecutors were banned from attending the hearing under the rules of hard-left District Attorney George Gascon.
Gascon calls his favoritism towards criminals, reform.
Jones showed up to the party armed with a gun and confronted a boy who was wearing a red Santa hat, which he had interpreted as a symbol of the bloods gang.
“The boy said, please don’t shoot me, and started to walk away,” said Dianne Baker-Taylor, Baker’s sister. “And that’s when Mr. Jones fired at him, and the crowd dispersed and as they dispersed, my brother, in the chaos, ended up running alongside [the boy], and they both died as a result of their injuries.”
It was cold-blooded murder.
THE CHILD RAPIST
In another case, the Los Angeles deputy district attorneys who successfully prosecuted the case against a pedophile who raped and sexually assaulted a brother and sister when they were children was barred from the parole hearing.
Ruben Beltran, a convicted pedophile, has been imprisoned since May 2004, serving a sentence of 15 to life after he was convicted of sexual assault of a child with intent to commit sodomy by force or fear.
In the early 2000s, Beltran raped and assaulted a young girl when she was six, and a young boy when he was eight. Beltran was a friend of the family, and took advantage of their trust.
The victims, now successful adults, both spoke with FOX 11 Wednesday night. Their identities will not be revealed.
“God, I was so young,” the sister said. “I was probably five or six, my parents had just been divorced when I was three or four, and [Beltran] moved in to ‘help repair the home,’ and so quickly after that, he just changed and turned into a manipulative monster.”
“He raped me,” the brother said. “The really hard part about it was I was a little boy, I didn’t have the words. The thing that’s so scary about him is he identifies the weak one he can hurt.”
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