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Efren Cruz's Defense Team: Serving Justice
In all probability, Efren Cruz should still be behind bars, serving a sentence of 41 years to
life for a murder he didn't commit. But Cruz got lucky, the improbable happened and now he
is free.
In January 1997, Michael Torres was shot and killed in a downtown Santa Barbara parking
lot following a scuffle with members of an Oxnard gang. Based on the testimony of an eye
witness and the presence of gun shot residue on his hand, Cruz - just on month out of the
army - was convicted and sentenced in Santa Barbara Judge Frank Ochoa's courtroom.
Two years later, an Oxnard gangster and a member of the Mexican Mafia told
Oxnard Detective Dennis McMaster - whose testimony helped convict Cruz - the real
shooter in the Torres killing was Cruz's cousin and Oxnard gangster Alfonso Rodriguez*. When
local authorities expressed no interest in this information, Bill Haney and McMaster
took matters into their own hands, on their own time. Even though it was a Santa Barbara
case, Haney and McMaster wired their client for sound and put him in a jail cell with Rodriguez.
While together Rodriguez admitted to their client that he - and not Cruz - did the killing. Despite
this tape-recorded confession - and several entreaties by Haney and McMaster to have the
case re-opened - S.B. authorities remained convinced they put the right guy away.
Two Ventura defense Attorneys - Philip Dunn and Kevin Denoce - agreed to take his case
free of charge. Their investigator Len Newcomb, turned up new evidence: several
witnesses had told the officers on the case they had heard Rodriguez confess to the killing, but
this information never surfaced. Armed with this evidence, they went before Judge Ochoa
and for three weeks it was prosecutor against prosecutor; cop against cop; Ventura against
Santa Barbara.
In the end, justice won. Judge Ochoa ruled that Cruz was wrongfully convicted and that the
real killer was Rodriguez. By then, Cruz had spent four-and-a-half years behind bars. Later
McMaster would explain, "I was just doing my job." Perhaps lucky for Cruz that Haney,
DeNoce, Newcomb, and Dunn were just as dedicated to theirs. But not just lucky for Cruz,
lucky for Santa Barbara, too.
*-names changed to protect the identities of the parties.
