The man accused of stabbing two brothers, leaving one to die,
after a bar fight in downtown Gilroy last year will face trial for
murder even though the surviving victim did not identify the
defendant as the stabber.
The man accused of stabbing two brothers, leaving one to die, after a bar fight in downtown Gilroy last year will face trial for murder even though the surviving victim did not identify the defendant as the stabber.
Instead, Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Teresa Guerrero-Daley relied on testimony from the defendant’s colleague and friend, a man identified by his last name, Nava, who told the court Thursday that Osiris Quintero Munoz, 27, admitted to stabbing Adan Arvizu Cabrera, of Salinas, and fatally wounding his older brother, 26-year-old Juan DeDios Arvizu Cabrera of Castroville. Munoz’s arraignment will occur 8:35 a.m. Feb. 2 at the Superior Courthouse in San Martin.
Dressed in a hooded, gray sweatshirt with dirt stains and coping with a visibly painful back injury, Nava quietly told the court through a Spanish interpreter the same thing he told police last year: Munoz called him some time after 1 a.m. March 16 to say he had been in a fight at Rio Nilo, 7466 Monterey St., and needed to drop off his Chrysler Sebring at the Morgan Hill ranch where Nava lived and worked. Nava said Munoz – who shook his head occasionally during Nava’s testimony – showed up shortly thereafter with a cut on his wrist and began telling him about the fatal fight before two unknown men entered Nava’s apartment without saying anything and then left with Munoz in a different car. The next day, Munoz returned to the ranch alone and told Nava he had stabbed two people and needed to fix his passenger-side window, which Rio Nilo security guards shattered the night before with a flash light as Munoz fled the crime scene, according to court records and witness statements.
“I just told (Munoz) that I didn’t want any problems,” Nava said repeatedly on the stand.
Neither did Adan Cabrera, who clenched his jaw and looked away when Deputy District Attorney Valerie McGuire showed him photos of his brother’s bloodied body outside the bar. With his wife and two other women in the front row of the gallery, Adan Cabrera never broke down and recounted the night through hours of questioning from both sides.
Munoz’s public defender, Enrique Colin, highlighted the 10 beers or so Adan Cabrera said he and his brother each drank throughout the night before a woman at Rio Nilo asked the younger Cabrera to buy her a drink. He did, but then she wanted more, and soon two guys came up and started giving the brothers and a friend of theirs a hard time, he said.
This upset the older Cabrera, who had a short fuse when he drank, but Adan Cabrera said they initially avoided a scuffle by moving to another part of the club. That lasted until one of the men from the bar, identified in court documents and Gilroy’s Most Wanted as Bernabe Mungia Zuniga, grabbed the older brother. A brief fight broke out before security guards kicked the Cabreras out the rear door. About a minute later, as the brothers were calling a taxi, Zuniga came flying out the back door, Adan Cabrera said.
The older brother chased down Zuniga and began fighting him, and Adan Cabrera said he followed for fear of his brother’s actions, but before he could break up round two, he said Zuniga yelled out for someone to get a gun.
When Adan Cabrera turned around, he said he saw the second guy from the bar running in his direction from the front door on Monterey Street. Police believe this second man is Munoz, but the defendant has told police the second guy was “Piliberto Martinez,” a man he did not know well who he said has has since fled to Mexico. Police have not said whether they have any information on this man, but to complicate matters, Adan Cabrera said the second man ran from the front door toward a blue car, which did not match the description of Munoz’s champagne-colored convertible.
“I didn’t see well because I was looking for someone to help,” Adan Cabrera said.
After the second man grabbed something from the car, he ran up and stuck Adan Cabrera in the left side and then went over to Juan Cabrera and stabbed him at least three times while Zuniga beat him in the back, according to court records and Adan Cabrera’s testimony. After hearing shouts, security guards came rushing over, but Adan Cabrera said the two suspects escaped in the blue car.
In the affidavit, Munoz told police he tried to stop two friends from fighting the Cabrera brothers, but he said security guards ejected all of them before he could. Outside, Munoz said he walked to his Sebring and sat in it before the unknown suspect who fled to Mexico jumped into his car and yelled, “Let’s go! Let’s go!”
It remains unclear whether these two males could be the same pair who showed up at the ranch with Munoz the night of the stabbing. Nava – the farm worker who said he has known Munoz through the ranch for about nine years – said he knew Zuniga as one of Munoz’s friends, but he did not identify him as one of the two silent men in his apartment the night of the stabbing. Also, in a follow-up interview in April, Adan Cabrera identified Zuniga as one of the men, but he never fingered Munoz’s mug among any of the police photos.
Police arrested Munoz, though, nine days after the stabbing upon receiving a tip from a confidential informant that led them to Munoz’s Sebring at the ranch at 2280 Cochrane Road. Using DMV records, officers tracked Munoz down at his crowded Gilroy apartment on El Cerrito Way, and they arrested him for illegally possessing a single .380 round – a probation violation as Munoz was found guilty of assault with a deadly weapon by the same court in September 2006. Police also recovered a 4-inch blade and a towel that “appeared to have blood stains,” according to court files.
Colin called into question the apartment search because he said police recovered the bullet in a box that sat on a cluttered rack in the living room, accessible to the three other adults and two children who were inside during the search. Only the CDs, coffee doilies and other clutter around the box belonged to Munoz, Colin argued, but Detective Frank Bozzo maintained that Munoz told his partner the box was his, and Bozzo also said Thursday that Munoz admitted to owning the box during a conversation after the search.
“But that’s not indicated anywhere in your police report,” Colin said.
Bozzo admitted the omission, but the judge still felt there was enough evidence to hold Munoz accountable for probation violation in addition to the murder charge.
