Is a killer of 4 people in Palm Springs on trial or still at large? A jury will now decide

Nearly four years to the day after four people ― including three teenagers ― were shot dead in Palm Springs, the fate of the man charged with the killings is in the hands of a jury for the second time.

Jose Larin-Garcia, 23, faces the possibility of the death penalty if convicted of the four slayings, which took place on Feb. 3, 2019. A Riverside County prosecutor delivered a lengthy and impassioned closing argument on Wednesday to the jury, and Larin-Garcia's attorney made his argument Thursday morning.

Larin-Garcia’s first trial ended without a verdict. It spanned late 2021 and the early months of 2022, before a mistrial was declared in March of that year after a jury could not reach consensus.

"We may never know why they were killed," Deputy District Attorney Samantha Paixao said. "Some people just like to kill."

John Dolan, Larin-Garcia's attorney, countered Thursday morning that the shooter remains at large, focusing on police radio traffic from the scene of the killings indicating a man was seen limping from the area of the car crash in the opposite direction from where Larin-Garcia was later found.

"Jose Vladimir Larin-Garcia is charged with killing four people on Feb. 3, 2019," Dolan said. "There's no question that they died that day. There's no question those families are suffering. The question is who did this?"

After the defense argument and the prosecutor's rebuttal Thursday, the judge excused jurors for the weekend. They will return to the courthouse in Indio on Monday morning to begin deliberating.

Palm Springs Police Department officers were dispatched to the 3700 block of East Sunny Dunes Road, where in a crashed car three people were found shot dead: Jacob Montgomery, 19; Juan Duarte Raya, 18; and Yuliana Garcia, 17. The body of Carlos Campos Rivera, 25, was found several blocks away on Canon Drive.

Paixao built the case over months that Larin-Garcia was a passenger in the car, a green Toyota Corolla, who shot one man dead during a drug deal and killed the other three while they sped away from the scene, leaving the car to careen into a brick wall.

She started her closing argument Wednesday by naming each victim and saying they were executed. She provided a detailed summary of how forensic analysis of the bodies concluded they were each shot at least twice in the head, that blood spatters showed the shooter was in the back seat, and scant evidence indicating the victims knew they were about to be shot. The only possible suspect, Paixao told the jury, was the defendant, who was the only person who left the car alive.

"Not only is Larin-Garcia an executioner, he’s a coward," Paixao said. "He shot Duarte-Raya in the back of the head, he didn’t even get a chance to defend himself."

Larin-Garcia was found hiding under a truck just off Sunny Dunes Road, a few blocks away from the crashed car. He had removed some articles of clothing, which later were found to have blood on them, and was taken to the hospital for treatment of a laceration. He left the hospital wearing a hospital gown unannounced and before he was discharged by doctors that same night, walking to the nearby home of a friend, Joseph Beaver. The friend helped gather Larin-Garcia’s belongings from his mother’s house and purchased him a bus ticket to Florida under a fake name, investigators said.

Dolan took issue with Paixao's characterization of Larin-Garcia as an executioner and coward, saying he was fleeing the scene and the hospital because he believed he was the final target.

"One person is seen leaving the crime scene," Dolan said. "No witness saw Larin-Garcia running in the direction of where he was found under the truck ... He was hiding under the truck because he was evading the shooter. He was scared to death. Larin-Garcia is hiding from him, not from law enforcement."

Detectives arrested Larin-Garcia at an Indio bus station soon before he was scheduled to depart.

Paixao has repeatedly disputed Dolan's claim that another person was in the Corolla and successfully evaded police. In a rebuttal Thursday, she underscored that a man who attempted to take credit for the killings later on social media, John Olvera, told detectives and the jury during testimony that he was lying.

"There is zero evidence that another person got out of that green Corolla," Paixao said.

Larin-Garcia's second trial began in September but was nearly called off after months of testimony when a Palm Springs police employee found evidence that was previously reported as lost. Larin-Garcia’s attorneys asked for a mistrial, saying further analysis was needed of the contents of a bag found in the trunk of the crashed car. Court debate on the matter revealed that it contained glass shards collected at the scene and a bullet casing thought to have been missing.

Judge Anthony Villalobos excluded the new evidence, denied the motion for mistrial and the closing statements were scheduled. Paixao told the jury Thursday that the police investigating the killings had made mistakes. In addition to the bag of evidence being temporarily lost, she said, some of the 911 dispatch recordings were purged.

"While there were errors, do they create a reasonable doubt?" Paixao asked the jury, adding that amid all the uncertainty of the years-old case, that the killings were committed in a coldly calculated way by the only suspect found near the bodies: "Four people within minutes. Every single shot Larin-Garcia did on February 3, 2019, was a targeted kill shot. Every single one of them."

Christopher Damien covers public safety and the criminal justice system. He can be reached at christopher.damien@desertsun.com or follow him at @chris_a_damien.

This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Palm Springs quadruple homicide trial: murder case in jury's hands again