Barsi suspect’s checkered past includes numerous assaults on
women
Gilroy – They raped her one by one, said the 24-year-old woman, one of David Vincent Reyes’ first victims. Reyes, then 18, was among the three men who threatened her at knifepoint, raided her purse and scratched and bloodied her two days before Christmas in 1984, after picking her up from a San Jose nightclub.
Reyes recalled it somewhat differently.
“We robbed some chick … stole PCP and cash from her,” he said in 2001, according to District Attorney George Kennedy and Deputy District Attorney Deborah Baldocchi.
As for the assault, Reyes claimed he merely gave the woman a kiss.
Last week, Reyes confessed to murdering his girlfriend Franca Barsi, the 1986 Gilroy Garlic Queen, according to Detective Mitch Madruga. The crime rattled friends and family members, who recalled a sparkling actress, athlete and homecoming princess, a devoted mother to her 10-year-old son, Andrew.
But while the murder was a shock to those who knew Barsi, it may not have been a shock to those who knew Reyes.
Barsi’s murder is the latest crime in Reyes’ near-lifelong career of violence against women, beginning in his teens. In 1985, at an age when most people graduate high school, Reyes pled guilty to attacking the 24-year-old woman. His charge, assault with intent to commit rape, was amended from the original charge, forcible rape. At the time, Reyes pleaded for “the chance to become a man outside of jail.” The judge denied him that chance: Reyes was sentenced to nine months in jail, and three years’ probation.
Though he pleaded guilty, Reyes denied the crime as late as January 2004, when his attorney made a motion to dismiss his prior conviction. Reyes was about to be tried for failure to register as a sex offender in the years 2002 and 2003, and the crime constituted a “strike” under the law. Kennedy and Baldocchi responded to the motion with a blistering account of Reyes’ sordid past.
“His characterization of the victim as ‘some chick’ and his denial of his crime show his disregard for women and his disregard of the seriousness of his conduct,” they wrote in opposition statement on April 9, 2004. After his 1985 conviction, Reyes was arrested twice more for battery: once in 1992, and once in 2003, according to Kennedy and Baldocchi’s statement. Both assaults were on women.
His criminal record is splotched with drug use, including PCP, LSD and methamphetamine. When arrested in 1985, he tested positive for PCP. Kennedy and Baldocchi wrote: “The defendant’s claim that [an] allegedly ‘work related’ injury contributed to his drug use is ridiculous since (1) he was unemployed and (2) his drug of choice appears to be methamphetamine, which is not known to be an effective pain reliever,”
The attorneys requested a 32-month prison sentence for Reyes’ two-year failure to register as a sex offender. Reyes was sentenced to another year in jail.
Reyes failed to register again in June 2005, even after Madruga reminded him of the requirement Sept. 1, 2005. Madruga requested a warrant for his arrest four days later. It was the first of two offenses that would land him on Gilroy’s Most Wanted list.
The second, an armed robbery and carjacking, took place July 16, 2006 at Rock Zone, a piercing shop located at 1323 First St. Reyes and an accomplice stole $251 in cash, about $300 worth of pipes, and left two employees in a haze of pepper spray.
Months later, employee Elizabeth Vera, 23, recalls that day in vivid detail. She’d seen Reyes before: over a period of two years, he’d entered her store “maybe six times,” she said.
“I see hundreds of people every day,” Vera said, “but his is a face you don’t forget.”
