Three inmates began the night drinking in Cell 124, but before dawn, one of them was dead and two were mired in blood and appeared to be bragging about the killing to stunned prison guards.
Jurors heard opening statements in the death-penalty trial of Rudy Cabrera Sablan on Wednesday in U.S. District Court. He is charged with first- degree murder in the death of his cellmate, Joey Estrella.
The homicide took place at the U.S. Penitentiary in Florence on Oct. 10, 1999. William Sablan, a distant cousin of Rudy Sablan, was convicted in the murder last year, but a lone juror voted for life without parole instead of the death penalty.
Prosecutor Brenda Taylor showed jurors images of Estrella’s organs strewn about the cell during the murder. Estrella was choked to death and disemboweled during the 3 a.m. incident.
“It’s the quiet time; it’s normally the time that nothing happens,” Taylor told the jury about conditions inside the Special Housing Unit where the three men were incarcerated.
“It’s not a quiet night. It’s a night that a horrific act occurred.”
Perpetrator or watcher
Taylor told jurors that Rudy Sablan taunted the guards outside his cell while they waited for backup.
“He holds an organ up to his mouth and pretends to take a bite,” she said of Rudy Sablan. “Do you want some of this? I can get the heart for you.”
But Sablan’s defense attorney, Forrest W. Lewis, told jurors that William Sablan was the perpetrator and that Rudy Sablan was merely trying to survive by “a different culture and a different code” in prison. He suggested to the jury that Rudy Sablan acted with bravado to protect himself.
“You can’t look weak,” Lewis said. “You can’t go in a corner and say, ‘I am going to throw up. I had nothing to do with this.’ ”
The jury is made up of nine men and eight women. Five of them are alternates. They did not take their eyes off their screens in the jury box as a videotape taken by guards minutes after the homicide was played for them.
The video shows William Sablan sitting on Estrella’s body and frequently mutilating it.
An alcohol-fueled fight
Rudy Sablan has his back to Estrella’s body and calmly rolls a cigarette at one point.
“I’m the one who did it,” William Sablan says to the guards.
“Relax yourself,” Rudy Sablan tells him, in one of many efforts to keep him from speaking to the guards about what took place.
The Sablans and Estrella were drinking homemade alcohol in their cell that night.
Lewis told jurors that Estrella was a mean drunk and got into a fistfight with William Sablan before the homicide occurred. Estrella’s blood-alcohol content after he died was 0.254 percent.
Rudy Sablan tried to break up the fight twice, and after the murder, William Sablan apologized to Rudy Sablan for what happened, Lewis said.
“It was a perfect storm,” Lewis said of the conditions in the cell that night. “And this perfect is particularly bad.”
Felisa Cardona: 303-954-1219 or fcardona@denverpost.com
