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A 34-year-old Fairfield man, acquitted in March for the 2018 first-degree murder of his father and the jury hung on second-degree murder, later pleaded no contest to voluntary manslaughter and was sentenced last week to 11 years in state prison, The Reporter has learned.
Victor Alfonso Estrada, who appeared April 27 in Department 11 for the sentencing hearing, faced Judge William J. Pendergast, who handed down the sentence, as stipulated in the April 3 plea agreement, in the Justice Center in Fairfield.
Estrada’s attorney, Deputy Public Defender Nick Filloy, confirmed the sentence.
Estrada, who has been in custody for more than five years in a case at the intersection of the state’s mental health and criminal court systems, remains in the Stanton Correctional Facility, a check of jail records showed on Thursday, and awaits transfer to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
With the no-contest plea, Estrada did not admit guilt but essentially stated he would offer no defense, and Pendergast, hearing the plea, found him guilty of the lesser charge. Voluntary manslaughter is generally described under the Penal Code as the unlawful killing of someone during a sudden quarrel or the heat of passion.
Deputy District Attorney Ilana Shapiro prosecuted the case,
As previously reported, Pendergast, who presided over the seven-week trial, declared a mistrial on March 21, when the jury, after five days of deliberations and the acquittal on March 20, were unable to reach a verdict on the second-degree murder charge.
In a text message afterward, Filloy told The Reporter that “the jury worked very hard and was commended for their service” by the judge, himself and Shapiro.
Filloy did not comment at length on the trial’s outcome, only adding, “Hung juries are not a good or bad thing. It is an outcome that is built into our system.”
Court records show that Suisun City police believe Estrada killed his father, Alfonso Rodarte, 48, on the morning of March 24, 2018, shortly before police received a 911 call reporting a stabbing outside a residence in the 500 block of Line Street.
Additional information indicated Estrada, a previously convicted felon, was believed to be estranged from his father at the time he assaulted him with a claw hammer, court testimony indicated. He was arraigned on the charges three days after the killing.
During the trial, Filloy took a risk and called Estrada to the witness stand, opening up his client to Shapiro’s pointed cross-examination.
She got Estrada to admit that, as he told investigators, he had a “verbal confrontation” with his father, and, at one time, hit his father and kept hitting him while his father was on the ground on March 24.
While on the witness stand, Estrada appeared to admit that he killed his father but denied he went to his father’s house to fight with him. He also didn’t tell anyone he was going to visit his father, who, by one account, did not approve of his son’s girlfriend.
Estrada testified that he stabbed his father outside the home with a pocket knife, gesturing with his right arm and hand outstretched, stabbing him in the neck and “immediately retracted it,” then fled.
But Shapiro got Estrada — who was previously convicted in February 2015 of twice striking a cousin with a crowbar, a felony — to admit that he lied during an interview with Suisun City police investigators after the stabbing.
Showing jurors a video of the interview, she said Estrada, with then-Police Chief Timothy Mattos leading the interrogation, showed no remorse about killing his father and thought his father was “no good” and disrespectful. At one point, as he spoke with Mattos, Estrada appeared to make a joke about killing his father.
On brief redirect before an afternoon break in the trial, Filloy asked, “Did your father talk about being a Norteno?” It was a reference to his father being in a notorious Northern California street gang that pays tribute to Nuestra Familia, a criminal organization, while in California state and federal prisons.
During her closing argument in mid-March, Shapiro told the 12 jurors and two alternates that Estrada brought a claw hammer, not a knife, to his father’s house and showed images, enlarged on a video monitor, of a blood-soaked hammer.
“If he’s willing to lie to you about what he brought to the house, you can’t trust much else of what he says,” she said, adding that the hammer had his father’s DNA on it.
On Aug. 8, 2020, Pendergast ordered Estrada, then 31, to spend two years, the maximum term, in a state hospital for the killing. Proceedings, however, continued on Nov. 20, with Pendergast hearing a placement report and an order to show cause.
Court records indicate that Pendergast had doubts about Estrada’s ability to understand trial proceedings as the case made its way through the court system. Typically, when a defendant is confined at one of five state hospitals the purpose is to restore mental competency.
Estrada apparently was declared competent after treatment and counseling, and Pendergast scheduled the trial.
Originally published at Richard Bammer