The arrests capped a more than two-year investigation into the assault, which occurred at a peak of gang violence in the city that since 2006 has claimed the lives of three teenage boys.
Authorities said the victim was attacked at 10:10 p.m. on Sept. 20, 2007, while walking home from a basketball game. Lt. Paul McCaffrey said a car pulled up to the boy, and several people jumped out to confront him.
“Without provocation the suspects, each armed with a knife, suddenly attacked the victim,” he said. “They surrounded him and stabbed him multiple times, including the neck and torso.”
McCaffrey said the victim was left for dead. But somehow, he said the boy managed to stagger to his home, located a block away, where someone called police.
Until the sweeping Operation Gator Roll investigation in November 2008, which was aimed at the city’s warring gangs and resulted in 160 arrests, McCaffrey said investigators had few leads in the assault.
However, in the wake of Operation Gator Roll, he said, “avenues were opened toward solving this and other unsolved attacks.”
The three people arrested, all of whom were juveniles at the time of the attack, are Ruben Nicholas Mize, now 17, Carlos Rafael Lopez, 17, and Jacob Munoz Medina, 19. All were charged with attempted murder and the enhancement of committing the crime to benefit a criminal street gang, and all are being tried as adults. The trio is believed to be associated with gangs on the city’s Eastside.
For Mize, who has been in jail for much of his adolescent life, the new charge is just the latest in a string of serious crimes he’s been implicated in. He is facing murder charges in connection with the July 2007 killing of 16-year-old Lorenzo Valentin Carachure, and three separate charges of attempted murder, two from the night of the Carachure killing and one from a Jan. 17, 2008 incident.
Mize is also facing assault charges in connection with an assault earlier this year in Santa Maria Juvenile Hall. He has pleaded not guilty. Also involved in this assault was Ricardo “Ricky” Juarez, who is serving a 17-year prison sentence for the March 2006 slaying of Luis Angel Linares. He too has pleaded not guilty in the juvenile hall assault.