A Norteños gang member killed a woman sitting at a Portland MAX stop when he sprayed bullets at a rival and hit her, a jury found Wednesday.
Gladis Mendoza-Hernandez was sitting inside a brick vestibule at the East 148th Avenue light-rail station with her back to the tracks when Isai Ramos Damian pulled up on East Burnside Street and fired wildly at her and two men about 11:20 p.m. July 6, 2022.
Mendoza-Hernandez, 42, was struck twice and died at the scene. She wasn’t a member of the rival Sureños gang, but prosecutors said one of the two men accompanying her was.
A Multnomah County jury deliberated for about eight hours over two days before finding Ramos Damian, now 24, guilty of second-degree murder in her killing, as well as attempted murder, second-degree assault and unlawful use of a weapon for wounding the rival.
Ramos Damian had finished a night of bar hopping with his sister and was dropping off her friend nearby when he spotted the group by chance and yelled out, “what hood are you from?”
One of the men, Brandon Dunn, replied that he was affiliated with “PLS,” a Sureños set, according to trial testimony.
Ramos Damian drove back home to the Lumina Apartments in Gresham, left the car running for three minutes while he retrieved a handgun, then headed straight back to the area where the “hood check” occurred, Senior Deputy District Attorney Todd Jackson told the jury Tuesday.
“The person who did this shooting knew exactly who they were looking for,” Jackson said. “But the real tragedy is that Gladis Mendoza-Hernandez was not involved in this fight.”
The hail of bullets hit Mendoza-Hernandez in the back and arm and wounded Dunn in each foot, while the third man was able to leap from the platform unharmed.
Surveillance videos captured the shooting, but the footage was too pixelated to identify the driver of the 2021 Toyota Corolla used in the shooting, defense attorney Russell Barnett said in court.
Dunn initially told police the shooter was a “fat bald Black man,” Barnett said, and no gun was recovered when Ramos Damian was arrested eight months after the shooting.
“There is no witness who identified this man as the person who killed her,” Barnett said of Ramos Damian. “There is no physical evidence that he ever even had a gun, much less fired the gun in question.”
Jackson countered that Dunn also misidentified the suspect car as maroon, though the video showed it was painted black, and that eyewitness accounts are notoriously shaky.
Investigators, however, were able to trace the car’s movement from its infotainment system and by tracking cell tower pings on the cellphones of Ramos Damian and his sister.
Ramos Damian didn’t testify during the trial, but following his arrest, a police detective noticed his “four dot” hand tattoo, the Norteños’ calling card and asked how he would identify a rival gang member.
Ramos Damian answered that once you’ve been out on the streets long enough, “you know who’s banging and who’s not, you just know,” according to Detective Calvin Goldring, who testified at the trial.
Damian Ramos faces a mandatory punishment of life in prison with the possibility of parole in 25 years during a July 12 sentencing hearing before Circuit Judge Amy Baggio.
—Zane Sparling covers breaking news and courts for The Oregonian/OregonLive. Reach him at 503-319-7083, zsparling@oregonian.com or @pdxzane.
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