EDINBURG — Nearly four years after his daughter’s murder, Sergio Cavazos finally allowed himself to breathe easy knowing her killer would not go free.

He choked back tears minutes after an Hidalgo County jury convicted 26-year-old gang member Mario Quintanilla in the woman’s 2005 slaying.

“I believe in God. I believe in justice,” Cavazos said. “And I believe that Larissa is looking down on us right now.”

Jurors took more than seven hours Thursday to find Quintanilla guilty of capital murder, setting off a second phase of the trial in which they will decide today whether or not to sentence him to death.

Their decision comes after an eight-day trial in which two of Quintanilla’s fellow members of the Hermanos Pistoleros Latinos gang described a detailed jailhouse confession of how he killed 23-year-old Larissa Cavazos.

Prosecutors allege Quintanilla and several other men broke into the woman’s Edinburg apartment during the early morning hours of Dec. 21, 2005, believing it to be a cocaine stash house. When they were unable to find any drugs, they beat her, shot her and left her to die.

An aspiring speech pathologist, the woman had graduated from the University of Texas-Pan American only days before her death and had a job interview in Brownsville scheduled for that morning.

While she had no known association to drugs, investigators believe another gang member had taken Quintanilla to her apartment days before the botched home invasion to purchase cocaine from a drug dealer attending a party there.

It took Edinburg police more than a year to link the slaying back to Quintanilla and his accomplices, but not before they investigated Larissa Cavazos’ boyfriend for the death.

Eventually, officers traced a cell phone taken from her apartment to a home Quintanilla and his accomplices frequented in McAllen. And once they started looking into his background, they uncovered a network of potential gang witnesses.

Two gang members told jurors this week that after Quintanilla had been charged with the murder, he described the woman’s death in vivid detail while confined in the Hidalgo County Jail. Their testimony corroborated much of the evidence police found at the crime scene, said Cregg Thompson, an Hidalgo County Assistant District Attorney.

“In order to catch bigger criminals, sometimes you have to go through little criminals,” he said.

But Quintanilla’s defense team questioned the trustworthiness of those gang members. Both men were serving sentences of their own for unrelated crimes and stood to gain by helping police solve the murder case, attorney Sergio Valdez said.

“From the moment (the state) got up there and made their opening statements, they were selling fear,” he said. “The evidence they presented doesn’t support these lying convicts.”

Prosecutors had hoped that testimony from Quintanilla’s accomplice — 33-year-old Alfredo “Fro” Gutierrez Valdez — would clinch a guilty verdict. In February, Valdez abruptly ended his trial for Cavazos’ murder by agreeing to plead guilty and accept a life sentence in exchange for a promise he would testify against his fellow gang member.

But when he was called to the stand last week, he refused to answer questions about his or Quintanilla’s involvement. It remains unclear what action the state could take against him for breaking his plea agreement.

Quintanilla now faces either a life sentence or the death penalty — the only two options available for a capital murder conviction. Jurors are expected to reconvene this morning to hear testimony in the punishment phase of his trial.

But as Sergio Cavazos left the courtroom late Thursday night, the bereaved father looked forward to the chance to finally address his daughter’s killer.

“That man has to pay for what he did to our family,” he said. “And he will pay.”

____

Jeremy Roebuck covers courts and general assignments for The Monitor. You can reach him at (956) 683-4437.