A 40-year-old Lakewood man was sentenced Friday to 95 years in prison for the murders of three men whose bodies were found in March 2011 at a plant nursery near Kent.
The defendant, Alberto Avila-Cardenas, was convicted by a jury in July on three counts of murder in the first degree with firearm enhancements for the fatal shootings of Jesus Bejar-Avila, 25, Yazmani Quezada-Ortiz, 26, and Cristian Alberto Rangel, 19.
The co-defendant the case, Jose Alfredo Velez-Fombona, 29, was also sentenced Friday to 10 years in prison. He pled guilty to a charge of murder in the second degree for his role in the murders.
Avila-Cardenas faced a sentence range 75 to 95 years in prison, which included the firearm enhancements. Velez-Fombona’s sentence range was 10 to 18 years. They were sentenced by King County Superior Court Judge Bruce Heller.
The bodies of the three men were found March 10, 2011, by an employee of Rainier Nursery near the West Valley Highway, in the 26200 block of 65th Avenue South. The three men had been shot in the head and then buried. The victims were last seen leaving their jobs at a Lake Union wholesale florist in Seattle on Dec. 12, 2010.
The motive for the killings appeared to be connected with a shooting in Lakewood that resulted in the death of two people and a foot injury to Avila-Cardenas, according to charging papers. It is believed that a cousin of Quezada-Ortiz may have been the shooter in the incident.
Cellphone records of Avila-Cardenas and Velez-Fombona show the two men traveled Dec. 12, 2010 to the Lake Union florist shop in Seattle where Avila-Bejar, Quezada-Ortiz and Rangel worked. They waited until the men got off work at about 3 p.m.
Cellphone records indicate Avila-Cardenas and Velez-Fombona traveled south, likely on Interstate 5, at around 3:30 p.m. The same records show the men arrived at about 4 p.m. in the area of the Rainier Nursery, and then leaving the area about 5:50 p.m. The records then show Avila-Cardenas and Velez-Fombona in the area of Velez-Fombona’s Kent residence on the West Hill, just a few miles from the nursery.
Detectives served a search warrant on the residence of Velez-Fombona. They found the cellphone used in the Dec. 12 calls as well as a goldish-colored GMC Yukon bearing Oregon plates, expected to be the same vehicle a witness saw when at least two men picked up Avila-Cardenas Dec. 12 at his Lakewood home.
King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg said the case was solved as a result of the hard work and persistence by detectives with the Lakewood Police Department and the King County Sheriff’s Office.
“The Lakewood Police Department put extraordinary effort into this case when it was just a missing persons report, and the Sheriff’s Office was able to use that work to swiftly build a case against the defendants once the victims’ bodies were found,” Satterberg said.
Detective Christopher Johnson of the King County Sheriff’s Office investigated the case. The prosecution team included senior deputy prosecutors Mary Barbosa and Kristin Richardson.
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