Had Sought Revenge for Insult to Mother : Pacoima Youth Gets 15 Years in Slaying

A Pacoima youth whose grandmother insisted in a letter that “he is not the type of person who would want to kill anyone” was sentenced Tuesday to 15 years to life in prison for murdering a man while seeking revenge for an insult to his mother.

San Fernando Superior Court Judge Edward I. Gorman ordered that Donald Maestas, 18, begin serving his term in the California Youth Authority before being transferred to state prison. Youth Authority officials can keep Maestas in their custody until he turns 25, Deputy Dist. Atty. Cesar Sarmiento said.

Maestas and 20-year-old Carlos Jimenez, also of Pacoima, were convicted in April of second-degree murder in the shooting death of 34-year-old Ricardo Sanchez in January, 1983, at Sanchez’s home in Pacoima. Jiminez was sentenced to 17 years to life.

Broke Into House

According to testimony during the non-jury trial, the youths broke into Sanchez’s house in search of a man identified only as Jorge. The youths later told detectives that Maestas’ mother had been slapped by a man named Jorge at a party at Sanchez’s home the month before.

When Sanchez said he didn’t know anyone by that name, Jimenez shot him as the victim’s pregnant wife and three young daughters watched.

Sarmiento said both youths were members of a Pacoima-based gang.

Maestas’ grandmother, Martha Mankiller, pleaded with Gorman in a letter to grant probation for her grandson, who she said has been serving as an altar boy while in custody, and let him go to live with her and his younger brother and sister in Tennessee.

“Donald’s parents were into drugs. He knew this and hated it,” Mankiller wrote, noting that Maestas’ father was stabbed to death in 1981 while an inmate at the state prison in San Quentin. “When he reached his teens, his mother seemed to influence him with her street sense. . . . Her way seemed like fun, I suppose.”

But Gorman said after the sentencing that he would not grant probation for a second-degree murder conviction.

“Sanchez’s widow is left alone with a family to support and all because of a cold-blooded act by two people who were upset about an insult,” he said.