Three jailed murder suspects accused of attacking a fourth

A ranking member of a Norteño street gang regiment implicated in several home invasion robberies and three homicides was stabbed multiple times inside the Stanislaus County Jail over the weekend. Charged with his attempted murder were three fellow Norteño inmates, also awaiting trial in separate murder cases.

David Ferrel, Joseph Jauriqui and Maurilio Vasquez were charged Tuesday with the premeditated attempted murder of Joe Ramirez, accused of killing three people – including a 10-year-old boy.

Ramirez was stabbed Sunday with a shank – a homemade knife – inside the Public Safety Center on Hackett Road, according to a criminal complaint.

Ramirez lost an eye as a result of the assault, said Deputy District Attorney Tom Brennan, who is prosecuting every case pending against Ramirez and will prosecute the case against the men accused of attacking him.

“He is still a human being regardless of his public enemy No. 1 status,” Brennan said.

Because Ramirez lost his eye, the defendants also are charged with aggravated mayhem and face a third charge of participating in a criminal street gang. The attempted murder and mayhem charges– both include gang enhancements – have maximum sentences of life in prison, Brennan said.

Ramirez is in stable condition at an undisclosed hospital.

“A gang turning on their own – it’s happened before,” said Brennan. “(Ramirez) is not cooperating, so we don’t really know why it happened.”

It’s not clear what, if any, connection the four men had, outside of their common gang association.

Ramirez has been incarcerated since April 2010, accused of being the leader of a Norteño street gang responsible for several home invasion robberies, said Brennan.

A 2010 home invasion robbery in Modesto’s airport neighborhood turned fatal when a man was shot three times in the back while trying to flee.

The robbers were looking for drugs and cash and targeted the wrong victims, according to investigators.

Nine people were charged in the case. Four of the defendants were convicted of home invasion robbery and murder last year. Three were sentenced to 80 years to life in prison; the fourth has hired a new attorney because his did not show up for the sentencing hearing.

One of the people originally charged agreed to a plea deal with a prison sentence of 25 years to life in exchange for his testimony against the others in the robbery and homicide and two other gang-related trials.

Three other defendants will be tried together and, for now, Ramirez’s case is also separate because he was charged later than the other defendants. The other defendants were separated into two groups because they are high-risk inmates and having them all in the courtroom at the same time would pose a security issue, Brennan said.

Ramirez’s second and third murder charges came in 2013, in a crime he is accused of committing in July 2009. Authorities said a 10-year-old boy and a man were killed in the La Loma neighborhood in an apparent gang retaliation shooting.

Testimony in the preliminary hearing against Ramirez’s co-defendants indicated the boy’s father was the intended target because he was a Norteño gang dropout in competition for the drug trade in what is considered Norteño turf.

The co-defendants were held to answer on all the charges after a preliminary hearing.

Ramirez is scheduled to be in court May 5 in the airport neighborhood homicide.

The three accused of attacking him were in court Tuesday but their arraignments were continued to Monday because their court-appointed defense attorneys must determine if they will have conflicts of interest representing them.

Jauriqui, 24, is one of seven defendants accused of killing three people inside a southeast Modesto home in 2012.

The slayings, authorities have said, were connected to the torture of a 19-year-old woman about a month before the killings. That woman later was the only survivor in the attack in the McClure Road home. No trial date has been set.

The Stanislaus County District Attorney’s Office is pursuing the death penalty against Jauriqui and three other defendants.

Ferrel, 34, and three others were charged with murdering two men in northeast Modesto in 2009. In 2012, a jury found Ferrel’s co-defendants guilty of two counts of first-degree murder. The defendants also were convicted of two counts of attempted murder, one of those charges stemming from shots fired at a police officer.

Ferrel faces the same charges, but a judge declared a mistrial for him after his attorney suffered a stroke and could not continue with the trial. His new jury trial is scheduled for October.

Vasquez, 27, is accused of shooting two men in the airport neighborhood, killing one, in 2008.

He was found in Michoacán, Mexico, in 2012 and extradited back to Stanislaus County. He’s charged with murder, attempted murder and two counts of assault with a deadly weapon. His jury trial is scheduled for November.

This story was originally published April 22, 2014 at 9:31 PM with the headline "Three jailed murder suspects accused of attacking a fourth."