Criminal
Jul. 27, 2002
Avila 'Was Not a Monster'
SANTA ANA - Alejandro Avila's defense attorney in an earlier molestation case spoke out Thursday about his former client, saying the man now charged with the kidnap-murder of 5-year-old Samantha Runnion "was not a monster."
"There was nothing I gleaned from the case I had with him that indicated that he was capable of [killing Samantha]," Temecula attorney John Pozza told the Daily Journal.
A jury acquitted Avila last year of molesting two 10-year-old girls in Lake Elsinore, near where Runnion's naked body was found July 17.
Pozza, the defense attorney in the case, said there was "a lot of weirdness" in the Riverside County molestation prosecution, including the fact that the two victims were never examined by a doctor.
There were also credibility problems with Avila's ex-girlfriend, Elizabeth Ann Veglahn, the mother of one of the alleged victims, Pozza said. Basically, he believed the case boiled down to "bad blood" between the former lovers, he recalled.
"I just remember as far back as possible that a motive for making up the stories was bad blood between the families," Pozza said. "Certainly it pains me that [Samantha's murder] occurred, and I don't know if he's guilty or innocent of the charges, but to go back and blame anybody [in the Riverside case] I think is incorrect."
Avila is being held without bail in an Orange County jail on charges he kidnapped, sexually abused and murdered Samantha, who was carried, kicking and screaming, from her Stanton condominium complex on July 15.
Arrested just five days after Samantha's body was found, Avila may face the death penalty for the killing, although Orange County prosecutors have not yet made a final decision.
The 2001 molestation case was based on sordid accounts from two girl cousins who swore that Avila forced them to perform oral copulation on him and told them to insert plastic tubes into their vaginas. The molestations allegedly occurred while Avila was baby-sitting the girls at various Lake Elsinore addresses.
Pozza said that although prosecutors brought a lot of evidence into the 2000-01 trial, most of it was circumstantial. The case also was complicated by the tangled relationships between the various characters. The molestation allegedly began while Veglahn was still living with Avila and continued after he moved in with Jose Barragon, who was dating Veglahn's sister, Rosemary Drabek. The other victim was Drabek's daughter.
To complicate matters further, two other girls - Barragon's daughter and another Drabek daughter - were prepared to testify that Avila molested them as well but were never called to the stand, for reasons that remain unclear, according to court papers.
For the two girls who did testify, Pozza said he did what any good defense attorney would: asked them to go over the details and nail down the supposed molestation timeline.
"Jurors afterwards told me they had issues with the girl's stories," Pozza said. "The jury was concerned that the stories were too far-fetched to be accurate.
"Basically my job was to scratch the surface to see if they had the evidence and the jury didn't think [what they had] was sufficient beyond a reasonable doubt."
Pozza said he also had real problems with Veglahn's testimony that Avila had called her on her cell phone and threatened to kill her. Veglahn testified she was sitting in a movie theater and traced the call back to a pay phone in the theater lobby. But cell phones can't dial back pay phone numbers, Pozza said.
A charge of making a terrorist threat was dismissed against Avila for lack of evidence, court records show.
Veglahn's testimony disturbed Pozza enough that he distrusted the rest of the evidence, including a child porn photograph found in Avila's apartment after he moved out.
"I certainly felt that the prosecution felt they had a strong case. But the evidence on the surface wasn't a slam dunk," he said.
The Avila defense was Pozza's first child molestation case. Now 41, the attorney had previously litigated sexual harassment, wrongful death and contract cases. But Avila's friends and family, who were strongly convinced of the defendant's innocence, persuaded him to take the case, Pozza said.
Prosecutors in the earlier Avila case could not be reached for immediate comment, although in a previous Daily Journal article, Riverside County Chief Deputy District Attorney Michael Soccio said the prosecution was difficult because of the perceived unreliability of child testimony.
Pozza said the Riverside County district attorney's office painted Avila as an opportunist who took advantage of his access to the girls, not as the killer and stalker he is now claimed to be, Pozza said.
Shortly after the acquittal, the judge in the molestation trial warned Avila to clean up his act, intimating that the verdict could have gone either way, according to a report in the Orange County Register.
"Your life would be totally destroyed were you convicted of an offense like this," Riverside County Superior Court Judge Robert G. Spitzer said in newly released court transcripts. "So you should be grateful to your defense team for the work that they put in and change your lifestyle to avoid these kind of accusations in the future."
Jenna Bordelon
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