A teenager who admitted stabbing an expectant father last year at a Catonsville gas station, but said the killing was the unintentional result of a botched robbery, was found guilty Monday of murder.
Daniel E. Thompson Jr., who turned 18 a month after the killing on May 10, was convicted of armed robbery and first-degree felony murder, a charge invoked when a death occurs during the commission of another felony. The jury, which deliberated for about five hours over two days, did not find Thompson guilty of premeditated first-degree murder, evidently agreeing with defense attorney Margaret A. Mead's assertion that he had not intended or planned to kill anyone.
Prosecutors are seeking a life term without parole for Thompson, who is to be sentenced April 9.
Thompson had told police that he was seeking money to buy marijuana and a Mother's Day gift when he fatally stabbed Carlos Adolfo Santay-Carrillo, 19. The Baltimore County Circuit Court jury watched a videotape last week in which Thompson told police that he had reached for his knife after Santay-Carrillo refused to give up his wallet.
Santay-Carrillo, who had gone to the Carroll Fuel station to fill up his car's tank so he could drive his wife to a hospital for the birth to their son, suffered 11 wounds, prosecutors said, including a fatal thrust to the heart.
"We're grateful for the support of the prosecutors, because it was through them that the law took its course for the person who did this," the victim's wife, Claudia Sales, said in Spanish outside the courthouse.
On the day of the killing, she had been waiting for Santay-Carrillo at their home nearby and, when he failed to return, summoned an ambulance for the trip to Howard County General Hospital. She was told that her husband had been injured but was spared the news that he had died until after she delivered the baby the next day, Mother's Day.
Sales said after the verdict that she talks to 10-month-old Carlos about his father. "Papa is no longer here," she said she tells the baby, "but his spirit is still with us."
The victim's parents, Conception Santay and Maria Carrillo, who traveled from their native Guatemala for the trial, said that it had not been easy to sit in a courtroom a few feet from the man accused of killing their son. The couple will return to their hometown, Chiantla Huehuetenango, on April 13, after attending Thompson's sentencing.
