Perhaps the creepiest song of the 1980s was “Into the Night.” The opening lyric: “She’s just 16 years old, leave her alone they said.”
It fits this case from Ohio perfectly.
Brian Tejeda was already a registered sex offender when he developed a fixation on a 16 year old girl. He was 26.
The girl rebuffed his advances and her mother literally told him to leave her alone.”Big Gucci Sosa” (as Tejeda was known on Instagram) wasn’t happy about that.
He continued to hang around, sometimes threateningly displaying a pistol and machete. Moms wasn’t having it so she (a convict herself) threatened him back with her gun. He lived across the street so things were tense.
One night, as the girl arrived home from visiting her friend “Little Chris” (to be distinguished, I suppose, from Big Chris), a masked gunman approached her car and opened fire.
The mom heard it – “pop pop pop pop pop” – and ran outside to find her daughter shot once in the leg, her car full of bullet holes. Mom jumped in and drove the bleeding girl to the hospital.
ShotSpotter heard it too and alerted police. A detective only located five casings, and that’s how many ‘pops’ the mom described in her testimony, but there were six bullet holes in the car and ShotSpotter evidence was admitted at trial to corroborate that, in fact, six shots were fired.
Even though the man wore a mask, the girl said she recognized him as Tejeda, including by his distinctive necklace. He was arrested later, and was wearing that necklace, but no gun was ever recovered.
Tejeda was charged with attempted murder, assault, and a sex offense for his alleged overtures toward the girl.
He was also charged under Ohio’s felon-in-possession statute, which there is called “having a weapon while under a disability,” and is awkwardly abbreviated as HWWUD. (Seriously, Ohio?)
His trial was bifurcated, and a jury acquitted him of the attempt murder and assault charges. I guess it was skeptical of the girl’s identification of the shooter.
At a bench trial on the other charges, though, the court convicted him of HWWUD. It acquitted him of the remaining charges.
Tejeda appealed. Insufficient evidence, he said. And the court’s determination that he possessed a firearm was inconsistent with the jury’s acquittal.
Yesterday the Court of Appeals of Ohio affirmed the court’s verdict. Whether it was at the time of the shooting, or during the threatening behavior mom described, or in the photo from Big Gucci Sosa’s Instagram account, he had a gun. And he shouldn’ta.
In a “sufficiency of the evidence” analysis, the court doesn’t consider whether the evidence is to be believed but rather if believed, was there enough of it. Here there was.
You can read the opinion here.
Here’s the video to the song. Every bit as creepy as the lyric. It featured a payphone (which were less useful for evidence than phones today) and a magic carpet.