Alejandro Avila was sentenced to death Friday for the kidnapping, sexual assault and murder of 5-year-old Samantha Runnion, moments after her mother unleashed three years of pent-up fury.
"You don't deserve a place in my family's history," Erin Runnion said, berating Avila through her tears.
"I want you to disappear into the abyss of a lifetime in prison where no one will remember you, no one will pray for you and no one will care when you die."
Orange County Superior Court Judge William R. Froeberg told the courtroom that with his crimes, Avila, 30, "has forfeited his right to live."
Friday's sentencing produced some of the most intense moments in the three-year-old case that prompted a statewide expansion of the Amber alert system and impelled the girl's mother to launch a neighborhood child-watch program.
The jury convicted Avila, a Lake Elsinore factory worker, on April 28 after nine hours of deliberation. Afterward, Runnion said Avila deserved to die. That also was the urging of the jurors, nine of whom attended the sentencing.
But on Friday, Samantha's mother reversed herself and told Avila she wanted him to live and think about what he had done.
"Everything in me wants to hurt you in every possible way," she told Avila, who sat expressionless, his back turned to her. "But when I'm very honest with myself, what I want more than anything is for you to feel remorse."
A woman interrupted Runnion's eight-minute discourse, yelling: "Take him out of protective custody." She was escorted from the packed Santa Ana courtroom by one of the six bailiffs.
Avila will become Orange County's 50th -- and California's 645th -- inmate on death row. He will be transferred within 10 days to San Quentin State Prison to wait, possibly for decades, for his execution. The last man executed in California was Donald Beardslee, in January, after 20 years and 10 months on death row.
None of Avila's relatives, some of whom were accused by his attorneys of beating and molesting him during his childhood, attended the half-hour hearing.
"His family has never done anything to him except try to destroy him from the day he was born," said one of Avila's attorneys, Assistant Public Defender Denise Gragg. Testimony from the six-week trial this spring showed that Avila kidnapped Samantha in the early evening of July 15, 2002, after asking the girl and her friend for help in finding a lost Chihuahua as they played outside their families' homes in Stanton. When Samantha approached him and asked how big the puppy was, Avila forced her into his car.
