12/12/2025
2 Young Men Sentenced for Murders of 19-Year-Old Woman, 17-Year-Old Girl
By TERRI VERMEULEN KEITH
City News Service
LOS ANGELES (CNS) - Two young men were sentenced today to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the killings of a 19-year-old woman and a 17-year-old girl at a park in Montecito Heights just over a decade
ago.
Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge George G. Lomeli called the crimes "gruesome" and rejected requests by defense attorneys for lesser sentences for Jose Antonio Echeverria and Dallas Stone Pineda.
Echeverria -- who was 18 at the time of the crime and is now 28 -- and Dallas Stone Pineda, who was 17 at the time of the crimes and is now 27 -- were convicted in September of first-degree murder for the October 2015
killings of 19-year-old Gabriela Calzada and 17-year-old Briana Gallegos.
Jurors also found true the special-circumstance allegations of murder
while lying in wait and multiple murders.
Pineda is expected to eventually have an opportunity at parole despite his sentence because he was under 18 at the time of the crime.
The victims' bodies were found by a woman walking her dog at 2:20 p.m. Oct. 28, 2015, and their deaths were quickly classified as homicides.
Briana was reported missing about 9 p.m. the same day, roughly seven hours after the bodies were found near Mercury and Boundary avenues along a walking path through Ernest E. Debs Regional Park.
Then-Los Angeles Police Department Chief Charlie Beck said one of the victims -- subsequently identified as Calzada -- had been shot and that both had been beaten.
Police said shortly after the killings that the crime was the result of a long-running gang feud, with prosecutors saying the two victims had grown up in a rival gang neighborhood and had a pre-existing friendship with the defendants.
Deputy District Attorney Stephen Lonseth told jurors that they had heard from the defendants' "own words what they did to those girls ... how
they brutally beat and ended those two girls' lives,'' and maintained that everything that they told an undercover operative behind bars was true.
"This is cold. This is calculated. This is premeditated. This is atrocious,'' he said, telling jurors that they lured the victims into a secluded area before ``beating them to mush.''
In re-arguments before jurors reached their verdict, Deputy District Attorney David Ayvazian said there was no evidence presented that anyone else committed the murders.
"There are no other killers. There are only two and they're sitting at this table," he said.
Defense attorneys countered that their clients' statements about the killings when they were in custody were false, with Echeverria's attorney, Robert Harton, arguing that his client was placed into an intimidating position with a person who lied to the two defendants and was posing as a senior gang
member.
Harton urged jurors not to use emotion or hatred to arrive at their verdict, saying that the defendants ``were teenagers'' and deserved a fair trial. He urged jurors to either acquit his client or find him guilty of one lesser count of second-degree murder, arguing that there were "two separate killings'' that "happened at the same time.''
Pineda's attorney, Mia Frances Yamamoto, argued that jurors should acquit her client of both killings.
"Dallas Pineda is not guilty of either murder,'' she said, adding that her client's comments to the undercover jailhouse operative were "all
bogus'' and `"all fake.''
During the sentencing hearing, Yamamoto told the judge that her client has "expressed remorse and regret.''
She cited a disparity in the evidence and the two defendants in asking the judge to sentence Pineda to the lesser term of life with the possibility of parole.
Echeverria's attorney asked the judge for a sentence that did not include life without parole, saying that his client's family fled from El Salvador -- where his father was a police sergeant -- and wound up in a neighborhood dominated by a gang in which Echeverria came "under their control."
In a sentencing memo calling for life-without-parole sentences for the
two defendants, Ayvazian wrote that Echeverria and Pineda "knowingly lured the victims -- both of whom trusted them -- into a dark hillside area'' at the park and then attacked them, with Calzada being shot in the head and both
victims beaten to death with a large rock.
"Gallegos was seven weeks pregnant, and the defendants knew this,'' the prosecutor added.
In a statement shortly after the Sept. 29 verdict, District Attorney Nathan Hochman said, "These brutal killings cut short the lives of two
teenagers and left their families devastated.'' He said the verdict delivers justice for the victims.''
