Prosecutor says gun, witnesses tie man to murder

By David Waite
Advertiser Courts Writer

The evidence against a 26-year-old man accused of murdering a homeless man at the Ala Wai baseball field on Dec. 28 includes two eyewitnesses, a murder weapon recovered by police and a confession the defendant made to his then-girlfriend, Deputy Prosecutor Franklin "Don" Pacarro told a Circuit Court jury yesterday.

But Deputy Public Defender Jerry Villanueva said in his opening statement that his client, Anibal Ortiz, was at least a mile away at a friend's apartment when Odin Ortiz, 37, was shot and killed at about 1:30 a.m.

The dead man and the defendant are not related.

The two eyewitnesses either misidentified Anibal Ortiz as the gunman or concocted a plan to blame Ortiz to hide the identity of the real killer or killers, Villanueva said. He said Ortiz's girlfriend initially supported his alibi and waited several months before turning a jacket over to police.

Pacarro told the jury that traces of gunpowder residue were found on the jacket, further implicating Anibal Ortiz.

Pacarro said Odin Ortiz and two other men found Anibal Ortiz rummaging through the belongings of several homeless people who were using the Ala Wai baseball field bleachers as shelter at night.

He said the two men reported hearing a loud bang a short time later and seeing Odin Ortiz fall onto the bleachers after he was shot through the eye. Anibal Ortiz told the two men to leave the area and to walk — not run — away, he said.

Pacarro said a friend of Anibal Ortiz saw Ortiz cleaning the gun at the friend's apartment the following day. And Anibal Ortiz's girlfriend, Lindsey Muschek, will testify that Ortiz told her the day after the shooting that he had killed a man at the Ala Wai field, the prosecutor said.

The shooting took place early on a Saturday morning and Anibal Ortiz was arrested the following Monday at a beach park in Nanakuli. A police officer had stopped to intervene in what looked like an assault against Anibal Ortiz, Pacarro said.

As background checks were taking place, police realized that Ortiz might have been the gunman involved in the Ala Wai shooting, Pacarro said. As Ortiz was being arrested, police found, half buried in the sand, a fanny pack with a revolver inside, Pacarro said.

He said tests later determined that a bullet removed from Odin Ortiz matched a bullet that was test-fired from the gun recovered when Anibal Ortiz was arrested.

The trial, before Circuit Judge Richard Perkins, is expected to last about a week.