Pair Guilty in Killings at CityWalk

For nearly three months, Jose Antonio Salinas sat in a Santa Monica courtroom, keeping a vigil for justice for his slain daughter.

He listened as prosecutors explained how Paul Carasi and his lover, Donna Kay Lee, murdered Carasi’s mother and his ex-girlfriend, Sonia Salinas, over child-support payments after a Mother’s Day luncheon at Universal CityWalk.

And as defense lawyers argued that police made the evidence fit their theory, that Lee was a third victim in the attack, not an assailant.

The father knew they were guilty, he said, “but you never know with juries.”

Monday afternoon, a jury confirmed that verdict for well over a dozen of Sonia Salinas’ relatives, friends and former co-workers who packed the gallery after nearly four days of deliberation.

The six-man, six-woman jury found the couple not only murdered Carasi’s mother and ex-girlfriend, but that they ambushed the women in a plot motivated by money--special circumstances that carry possible death penalties.

Shielded from view by her lawyer, Lee bowed her head slightly and quietly sobbed as a clerk read the verdicts, marking the end of the double-homicide trial and the beginning of a trial for their lives.

When the jury was excused, an explosion of emotion filled Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Leslie Light’s courtroom. Salinas’ parents could barely get single words out through their sobs.

Lee’s daughter and a woman and man who escorted her quietly slipped away as the hugs and kisses continued into the hallway.

“I am so very happy,” Salinas said when he finally caught his breath.

He, his ex-wife and their two remaining daughters have already written out the pleas for the death penalty they will make to the jury during a penalty trial, which will begin Wednesday. “These are the first people I have ever wanted dead in my life,” Salinas said. “But what they did was savage.”

Carasi, struggling with a $50,000 credit-card debt that required minimum monthly payments that exceeded his salary, decided to kill Sonia Salinas after she garnisheed his wages for child support for their son, Michael, now 5. His mother, Doris Carasi, apparently sided with the woman, prosecutors said.

After a celebratory Mother’s Day dinner at the Country Star Restaurant in Universal CityWalk, prosecutors said Carasi led the women back to the parking lot, where Lee was waiting and the two were knifed to death.

Salinas put up a fight, prosecutors said, and Lee was slashed in the stomach.

Bleeding, she drove to the Hollywood Freeway and dumped evidence off a highway embankment. Then she realized she’d locked her keys in her car. She called for help from an emergency call box and claimed she’d been stabbed by a gang during a robbery.

Back at the parking structure, Carasi called for help, telling police he and the women had been attacked by thieves who held him down as they killed the women.

His lawyer stuck to that story during the trial, arguing that he was covered in blood when he went to help his dying mother and ex-girlfriend, then wiped his bloody hands on his pants.

Public Defender Ralph Courtney told jurors that investigators “bungled” the case by not collecting some blood evidence at the scene that might have absolved his client. He did not call a single witness in Carasi’s defense.

Lee took the stand in the trial, which began in January, claiming she was not a killer but a third victim who was stabbed as she sat in her car waiting for Carasi. She testified she could not remember who stabbed her. Her lawyer, Henry Hall, said the memory loss was a product of years of abuse by the men in her life.

But jurors were swayed by a mountain of physical evidence presented by prosecutors, including DNA evidence that Lee left her blood on Salinas’ sneaker and got Doris Carasi’s blood on her jeans. A crime-reconstruction expert testified that Salinas was alive when she grabbed Paul Carasi’s shirt in the middle of the attack, and that blood sprayed on his shirt in little droplets consistent with a hand pounding a knife into a body.

Prosecutors were clearly elated by the victory, hugging the victim’s relatives and their own. But they declined comment.

Light has prohibited comments from lawyers, investigators and jurors until the end of the penalty phase of the trial.