Death penalty verdict by Sonoma County jury upheld

A state appeals court has upheld a Sonoma County jury’s death penalty verdict against a man convicted of murdering a Shasta County sheriff’s deputy in 1991.

The case against Tomas Cruz, now 40, was moved to Sonoma County when both sides agreed an impartial jury couldn’t be found in tiny Shasta County.

Cruz was convicted of first-degree murder in the October 1991 shooting death of Deputy Ken Perrigo.

Cruz, then a 23-year-old farmworker, had been arrested with a second man for public drunkenness. While waiting in the back of Perrigo’s patrol car in Burney, they found the deputy’s backup gun inside his fanny pack, which was tucked beneath the driver’s seat.

As Perrigo was driving the pair to the jail in Redding, Cruz shot him in the back of the head. The second suspect, Carlos Castillo Estrada, then 22, then took the gun and shot the deputy in the neck.

The pair escaped after the patrol car crashed. They were captured five days later. Estrada pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison.

A Sonoma County jury convicted Cruz in August 1994 and recommended the death penalty, the first time since 1981 that a Sonoma County jury sentenced a killer to death. The last death sentence recommended by a Sonoma County jury for a local case was for Robert Walter Scully Jr., who was convicted of killing county sheriff’s Deputy Frank Trejo with a sawed-off shotgun in 1995.

In an order released this week, a unanimous appeals court panel wrote: “All of defendant’s claims having been found to be without merit, we affirm the judgment in its entirety.”