People v. Wang

Decision Date24 March 2020
Docket NumberB294888
Citation46 Cal.App.5th 1055,260 Cal.Rptr.3d 343
CourtCalifornia Court of Appeals
Parties The PEOPLE, Plaintiff and Respondent, v. Caminero WANG, Defendant and Appellant.

Brad Kaiserman, Van Nuys, under appointment by the Court of Appeal, for Defendant and Appellant.

Xavier Becerra, Attorney General, Lance E. Winters, Chief Assistant Attorney General, Scott A. Taryle and Pamela C. Hamanaka, Deputy Attorneys General, for Plaintiff and Respondent.

LUI, P. J.

Caminero Wang appeals the judgment entered following a jury trial in which he was convicted of the first degree murders of his mother-in-law, Shu Zhang, and his father-in-law, Aiping Diao. ( Pen. Code,1 § 187, subd. (a) ; counts 1 & 2, respectively.) As to both murders, the jury found true the allegations that appellant personally and intentionally discharged a firearm causing death. (§ 12022.53, subds. (b)(d).) The jury also found the multiple-murder special circumstance to be true. The trial court imposed an aggregate sentence of life without the possibility of parole plus 50 years to life.2

Appellant contends reversal is required due to various instructional and evidentiary errors, prosecutorial misconduct, ineffective assistance of counsel, and cumulative error. Appellant also argues that the trial court erred in failing to consider whether to impose a lesser firearm enhancement.

We reject all of appellant’s challenges and affirm the judgment.

FACTUAL BACKGROUND
The Prosecution Case
1. Background

Appellant and Li3 met each other in China through their parents, and were married within a month. At the time, appellant had been living in the United States for about 20 years. After marrying, Li remained in China for over a year until 2007 when she received her visa and was able to move to the United States. They had three children, one daughter and two younger sons who were eight, six, and three years old in April 2016.

Throughout their marriage, appellant controlled Li’s daily activities and finances, requiring her to seek his permission to do almost anything. In 2011, Li obtained her nursing license, but appellant did not allow her to work. Appellant frequently started fights with Li. During every argument, appellant engaged in verbal abuse and threatened violence against Li and her parents, who were in China. During one altercation, appellant became extremely angry, cursed at Li and threatened to kill her. In the middle of the argument, appellant started to run upstairs. Li knew appellant kept guns upstairs in a gun safe, and she thought appellant was going upstairs to get a gun. Li believed the only reason appellant did not retrieve a gun on that occasion was that he injured his foot on the stairs and appellant’s mother yelled at him. During another argument in March 2013, Li suffered injuries and was bleeding from her nose and mouth after appellant punched her.

After this incident, Li took the children to China for two years. She returned to the United States with the children in February or March 2015. At first, appellant was nice to Li; he had a job, he helped with the chores, and he was good with the children. The family moved into a townhouse in West Covina in July 2015. But a month later, appellant lost his job and reverted "back to his old self," arguing with Li all day and threatening her parents. In September 2015, Li started working three to four days a week.

Li’s parents, Zhang and Diao, arrived from China in December 2015 for a four-month stay with Li and appellant. The parents did not speak English, and their cell phones did not work in the United States. They stayed in an upstairs bedroom down the hallway from appellant’s master bedroom. Li’s parents did not like appellant, and at some point they changed their return flight to China from April 19 to April 15, 2016, because they felt uncomfortable in the house with him.

2. Reports of Multiple Gunshots

On April 13, 2016, Li went work at 6:30 p.m., leaving her parents, the three children, and appellant at home.

About two hours later, several neighbors and others in the area called 911 to report hearing multiple gunshots. One neighbor reported hearing over 20 gunshots, children crying, and one child yelling for his or her mother. Appellant’s next door neighbor was awakened by gunshots and heard children crying. Another person heard a boy screaming in the townhouse across the street and saw a man on the second floor pacing back and forth before closing the blinds and turning off the light.

3. The Scene of the Shooting

Around 8:55 p.m. two West Covina police officers responding to the 911 dispatch knocked on the front door of appellant’s two-level townhouse. Appellant came down the stairs and immediately answered the door. He appeared to be frightened and showed symptoms of being under the influence of methamphetamine.4 More officers arrived, and appellant was detained and handcuffed. One officer kicked in the door to the downstairs bathroom and found the children. The youngest child had blood spatter and smeared blood on his pajamas. Other officers proceeded upstairs and found Zhang’s body at the top of the stairs near the door to the master bedroom. Diao’s body was down the hallway to the right outside a bedroom. The scene was "horrific," and there was blood everywhere.

Zhang’s brain matter could be seen around her head and splattered on the wall behind her head. There was high velocity blood spatter on the wall, which indicated the shot had been fired close to her head in an upward direction. She was missing several front teeth and there was a bullet hole in her mouth. Police recovered a tooth and an expended bullet casing from the stairs leading to the second floor.

Brain matter mixed with coagulated blood was around Diao’s head. The shape and pattern of blood spatter on the nearby bedroom door indicated that Diao was lying on the floor when he was shot. Two bullets were lodged in the hardwood floor under Diao’s torso. Bullets also went through the back of Diao’s torso and straight through the ceiling below.

A meat cleaver was found on the floor next to Diao’s left hand. The knife was positioned oddly in relation to the body and seemed out of place because it appeared spotless despite the amount of blood at the scene.5

4. Investigation and Evidence

Police recovered 11 expended bullets and 18 expended bullet casings from the residence. There were bullet holes in the high-vaulted ceiling above the front door and two bullet holes in the ceiling of the first floor office. On the desk in the office police found a computer with two tabs open for the West Covina police department along with a sheet of paper with the address of the West Covina police station written in appellant’s hand.

In the closet of the master bedroom police found a semiautomatic .45-caliber FNH model FNX-.45 handgun with an empty 10-round magazine inside it. The gun was in "slide lock," that is, the slide was locked to the rear, which happens when the last round is fired or the gun has been locked manually. A gun holster and two other 10-round magazines were found next to the gun; one had one round remaining, and the other had 10 rounds. Four more firearms, pistol boxes, and three boxes of ammunition were recovered from two locked gun safes in the master bedroom. Rifle ammunition was also found in the downstairs closet. All of the firearms were registered to appellant.

All 18 of the cartridge casings recovered, all of the expended bullets, and those bullet fragments not too damaged or small to be analyzed were determined to have been fired from the FNH handgun. The firearm was in proper working condition and it had five to six different safety mechanisms that were all in proper working order.

Appellant had no injuries. A gunshot residue test revealed that appellant had gunshot residue on his hands. The single source DNA profile on the trigger of the handgun matched appellant, and Zhang and Diao were excluded as possible sources. Bloodstains on the floor of the master bathroom matched Zhang’s DNA profile.

5. The Autopsies

Zhang suffered a total of 12 gunshot wounds, eight of which were fatal. The autopsy showed bleeding in the wound path of many of the wounds, indicating that Zhang was still alive when she suffered those wounds.

Zhang sustained two fatal wounds to her head, both of which would have caused her to lose consciousness and were very quickly fatal. One bullet entered her cheek, passed through the skull injuring her brain, and exited the skull through the back of her head. The other fatal head wound was around Zhang’s lips. Soot on the soft tissues underneath and behind her lips indicated the gun was in Zhang’s mouth when it was fired. The bullet lodged in Zhang’s brain.

Diao also suffered 12 gunshot wounds, 11 of which were fatal. Many of these wounds were suffered when he was still alive. Diao sustained six fatal gunshot wounds to the head, one to the right lung, three to the left lung, and one wound to the abdomen. Three of the bullets from the gunshots to the head were recovered from Diao’s brain. Diao sustained one nonfatal wound to his neck, but that bullet lodged in his skull, and the wound would have incapacitated and caused him to lose consciousness. With one exception, all of the bullets that struck Diao travelled from the back to the front of his body.

The Defense Case

Gunshot residue was collected from both Diao’s and Zhang’s hands, which indicated they "may have discharged a firearm" or may have been in the area of the discharged firearm or gunshot residue.

Appellant testified in his own defense.

Appellant stated that the only time he ever laid hands on his wife was during the 2013 incident when he hit her on the side of the head once or twice. He felt "very sorry" about the incident and acknowledged that he should not have struck her.

When Li’s parents came to visit in December 2015, appellant’s unemployment became a source of tension, and appellant and his in-laws argued frequently. Appellant...

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