A 22-year-old man who carried a handgun to a night of beach-party beer-drinking was convicted yesterday of using the weapon to murder Dillon Ching last year outside Ching's Sunset Beach home.

Dustin Jimenez testified during his murder trial that he packed the gun for "no particular reason" the night of May 19, 2007, when he met up with friends at a North Shore beach park on Kamehameha Highway opposite Ching's family home.

Jimenez said a fight broke out between the beach partiers and another group of eight young men who were drinking in the driveway of the Ching home.

Bottles and fists were thrown as the two groups fought in the middle of Kamehameha Highway near midnight.

That's when Ching, 30, arrived home with his wife and 2-year-old son in the car with him.

The family had been at a graduation party in Wahiawa. Ching's wife, Desiree, who was driving their truck, said she woke her sleeping husband to tell him there was "trouble" involving at least one of his younger brothers.

She said her husband got out of the truck and she inched the vehicle through the crowd to park in front of their home.

Desiree Ching said she locked her sleeping son in the truck and walked around the side of the house, arriving just in time to see Jimenez fire a gun in the air and then fire two shots "straight to my husband."

Ching was standing beside another pickup truck in an adjacent empty lot and did nothing to provoke the attack, according to his wife.

Fatally wounded, Ching stumbled 10 feet to his wife and collapsed bleeding to the ground.

He was pronounced dead later that night at Wahiawa General Hospital.

Desiree Ching was a few weeks pregnant with their second child, a son who was born earlier this year.

Jimenez testified that the fighting began after two men from the Chings' side of the highway began beating a friend of Jimenez.

At that point, he said, "Everybody just started fighting, rushing each other and throwing fists."

He said that when he walked across the highway, he saw two men run from the direction of the Ching residence carrying metal baseball bats.

He said he fired a warning shot from the handgun up in the air "to scare everybody off," then fired a second warning shot when he saw a man brandishing one of the bats.

Suddenly, Dillon Ching came "running towards me" from around the pickup truck, Jimenez said.

"In a split second," the defendant testified, he turned and fired two shots at Ching.

"I was scared that he had one bat and was probably going to bash my head in," Jimenez testified.

Jimenez was convicted by a Circuit Court jury of second-degree murder and faces life in prison with the possibility of parole.

Circuit Judge Richard Perkins presided over the jury trial and will sentence Jimenez later this year. Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Wayne Tashima represented the state. Defense lawyer Chester Kanai represented Jimenez.