Revenge drove gang killing

Two Fullerton gang members were on a revenge trip in March 1996 when they came across a rival – a 16-year-old boy – waiting outside his girlfriend's house, a prosecutor told a jury on Tuesday. The pair left their car and clobbered Troy Gorena with fists and stabbed him to death with a knife before fleeing the scene, Deputy District Attorney Larry Yellin said in the opening statements of a murder trial for one of the two men.   Yellin said defendant Joe Luis Garay, Jr., now 36, wielded the knife in the unprovoked attack, while co-defendant Kevin Jerome Carlson, 38, did the punching. Carlson pleaded guilty to aggravated assault in 2010 and now faces a maximum four-year prison sentence. He is expected to testify against Garay. Members of Gorena's gang had beaten Carlson a few weeks before the killing, a defense attorney said Tuesday. The slaying went cold early on due to insufficient evidence. It remained unsolved for more than a dozen years until the Fullerton Police Department and Orange County District Attorney's office reopened the investigation in 2008 with several re-interviewed witnesses, Yellin told the jury. The prosecutor contended the passage of time motivated some of the witnesses who refused to cooperate in 1996 to come forward now. But defense attorney Jerry Schaffer, in his opening statement, insisted that none of those witnesses actually saw the incident take place, and that Garay was on the street at the instant Gorena was stabbed by someone several feet away. The trial before Superior Court Judge Thomas Goethals is expected to last about a week. If convicted, Garay could be sentenced to 25 years to a life term in prison.