Guilty: Jury convicts Cathedral City man in kidnap murder case

A Cathedral City man was convicted of first-degree murder for killing a 21-year-old man in Sky Valley during a kidnapping four years ago. Andrew Michael De Los Santos, 30, faces life in prison without the possibility of parole for the death of Shane Ayala.

Jury deliberations began early Tuesday morning after the prosecution and defense concluded their final arguments , after which Riverside County Superior Court Judge Anthony Villalobos sent jurors behind closed doors to begin weighing evidence from the nearly two-week trial.

A key prosecution witness testified last week that she was smoking drugs in the defendant’s Cadillac Escalade when he admitted to her that he had taken Ayala out to the desert and shot him in the head.

De Los Santos has maintained that Ayala was killed in late August 2011 by the defendant’s 37-year-old accomplice, Luis Raul Diaz, who was convicted in a separate trial and sentenced last November to life in prison.

Ashley Prieto, 28, told sheriff’s investigators in 2011 that she and De Los Santos had run into each other during a party in Palm Springs and that while they were getting high in his SUV, she asked him if he knew what had become of Ayala, who had gone missing two months earlier.

Deputy District Attorney Manny Bustamante asked Prieto if she was certain the defendant told her that he, personally, had killed Ayala. “Absolutely,” she replied.

Defense attorney John Dolan grilled the witness about the reliability of her memory, given her drug usage. Prieto conceded that her mind was often cloudy as she at various times battled addictions to cocaine and prescription drugs, facilitated by the roughly $11,000 per month she received in “per capita” income as a member of a local native American tribe, she testified. “At that time I just wanted to be numb,” she said. “(I was) in and out of rehab; young, dumb and lots of money.”

Bustamante told jurors that De Los Santos overheard the victim making suspicious comments to someone during a cell phone call, moments before returning to find his Cathedral City condo burglarized.

De Los Santos and Diaz beat the victim and demanded he confess to organizing the burglary while the three men traveled to Indio to buy black tar heroin, the prosecutor alleged. “(Ayala) wouldn’t admit to stealing from him,” Bustamante said. De Los Santos ordered Ayala to take a shower, don a hoodie to cover his
busted lip and swollen, bruised eye, then ordered the victim to walk quietly through the Cathedral Canyon Country Club complex to Diaz’s Toyota Camry, according to the prosecution.

The three drove to Sky Valley, north of Thousand Palms, where De Los Santos allegedly killed Ayala and then came back months later and set fire to the remains, Bustamante said.

Dolan argued that it was Diaz who killed Ayala and that De Los Santos feared he might be next. All three men had been using drugs, and the precise day of the killing remains undetermined.