Just before his trial for assault with a deadly weapon was to begin in San Diego Tuesday, an Orange County man reversed his earlier plea and said he was guilty of smashing a beer bottle over the head of a Cowboys fan in the Qualcomm Stadium parking lot.
Ramon Heredia, 42, now faces up to 4 years in prison at his scheduled May 9 sentencing.
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Ramon Heredia, Chargers Fan in OC, to Stand Trial for Beer-Bottle Attack on Cowboys Fan
Heredia had previously been referred to as a Chargers fan, but reports by City News Service and a San Diego television station indicate the defendant, like 31-year-old victim Joshua Zumwalt, was a follower of the Cowboys.
Zumwalt testified during the case's preliminary hearing that he and some friends had a friendly encounter with Heredia's group of tailgating fans before the Sept. 29 Chargers-Cowboys game at Qualcomm. After San Diego dispatched Dallas 30-21, the 6-foot-5 Zumwalt says he was “talking trash” with some of his friends who are Chargers' fans when he believed he was sucker-punched in the side of the head.
He did not discover until later that he'd been hit once by an unknown fellow who has not been brought to justice and a second time by a beer bottle wielded by Heredia, whose attack was captured on cellphone video taken by onlookers in the stadium parking lot.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.