An Idaho man killed his mother’s suspected killer. The jury asked to grant him mercy

When 12 jurors found Raul Cuevas guilty of murder, they attached a rare note to the judge, asking him to grant Cuevas leniency.

The Nampa resident was convicted of second-degree murder after he killed the man suspected of fatally stabbing his 52-year-old mother, Michelle Luna. While the jurors acknowledged that Cuevas had committed a horrendous crime, it was under horrific circumstances. The same jury acquitted Cuevas of his initial first-degree murder charge.

Fourth District Judge Jonathan Medema said the jurors’ note was something he’d never seen throughout his nearly 30 years working within the criminal justice system.

“I’ve never seen a jury tell the trial judge that they do believe the defendant committed the crime, but they would like the trial judge to be — as I read it — understanding,” Medema said.

Medema sentenced 32-year-old Cuevas to 10 years in prison, with the possibility for parole after four years. Medema during the sentencing Tuesday acknowledged the difficulty of his decision, weighing both Cuevas’ legitimate anger and grief against the act of killing someone and 39-year-old Jesus Urrutia’s value as a human being.

“You made a very selfish decision — in an instant — to take his life,” Medema told Cuevas.

Cuevas’ Caldwell-based private attorney, Alexander Briggs, said his client was exasperated with law enforcement’s lack of action and overcome with emotion after coming face to face with his mother’s killer.

“Had Jesus not stabbed Michelle to death in Nampa, we wouldn’t be here,” Briggs said in court Tuesday.

Ada County Deputy Prosecutor Holly Koole pushed for a harsher prison sentence of up to 45 years in prison, arguing that despite Cuevas’ frustration with law enforcement and his justifiable anger, he didn’t get to take the law into his own hands.

“His anger, his sadness, his rage is justifiable, but the planned murder of a person is not,” Koole said. “This is not a heat of passion case. He opened a car door and stabbed a man in the heart.”

Cuevas ‘never intended to hurt’ Urrutia’s family

Just after 8:30 p.m. on March 28, 2023, officers from the Nampa Police Department responded to a home in the 2100 block of West Grouse Street after they got a 911 call that someone had been stabbed. There near the front door, officers found 52-year-old Luna, who had been stabbed in the chest, according to the autopsy report.

Luna had over a dozen defensive wounds across her body, the report said.

Within hours, Urrutia, who was living with Cuevas and Luna at the time, called Cuevas to tell him he had killed his mother and continued to taunt him throughout the night, Briggs said. Urrutia then told Cuevas that he was at a gas station off of Idaho 55, which Briggs said showed that Urratia wanted Cuevas or law enforcement to find him.

Briggs said Urrutia also called his sister, telling her that he wasn’t going back to prison and would rather die on the outside. Cuevas called a detective with the Nampa Police Department around 4:18 a.m. to inform him about Urrutia’s whereabouts, Briggs said.

The officer didn’t show up, Briggs said.

Briggs blistered at Koole’s comment during the sentencing that Cuevas chose to “hunt down” Urrutia.

“How can she even make that argument with a straight face?” Briggs asked, adding that Koole knew Cuevas had spoken to the detective an hour before he arrived at the gas station. “That cuts against every idea that this was a premeditated killing.”

The next morning, before 7 a.m., Ada County sheriff’s deputies arrived at an Exxon gas station off of Idaho 55 at the entrance of the Avimor development where they found Urrutia “slumped over” in a running but parked vehicle, the agency said in a news release. He was taken to a local hospital, where he died from a stab wound.

Deputies found Cuevas about five miles down Idaho 55, parked at another gas station. The Chevron manager previously told the Idaho Statesman Cuevas came into the store to use the gas station’s phone to turn himself in.

“I never intended to hurt Jesus’ mom or his family, and it’s something that I think about every day,” Cuevas said in court.

‘Took a brother, a father and a son’ away

For Urrutia’s sister, Lorena Urrutia Ruiz, her brother — whom she called “Tito” — was a hard-working, caring person and not the “monster” that people have viewed him as.

“That morning Raul took a brother, a father and a son away from the Urrutia family,” Urrutia Ruiz said. “He took the ability for me to receive big tight hugs from my brother and hear him say, ‘I love you, nena.’”

Urrutia Ruiz said Cuevas had plenty of opportunities to turn her brother in, and he chose not to.

“We too want justice done,” Urrutia Ruiz said. “but we are leaving it in the court’s hands to get that for us.”

Urrutia had been on parole for several violent crimes, including first-degree kidnapping when he killed Cuevas’ mother. Briggs pointed out that under that kidnapping charge in Idaho law, Urrutia should have been sentenced to life in prison.

Urrutia was convicted in 2015 and released from the Idaho Maximum Security Institution in November 2021, according to court records and the Idaho Department of Correction.

Briggs questioned whether Urrutia would have even been on parole last year had he received a more significant sentence.

“Would Michelle still be alive?” Briggs said.