Daniel Chomina had our ugly police mug judges with his smirk.
However, what he did to warrant the booking photo–and ultimate conviction–was also ugly.
After
bringing his 3-year-old daughter to his ex-girlfriend's for a
custody exchange in July 2009, the 29-year-old Garden Grove man became
enraged when he discovered another man in the master bedroom of her Lake Forest home. Chomina pulled out a gun, pointed it at the adults and used its butt to hit the man in the head.
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Chomina then ran out of the apartment, giving the occupants time to lock themselves inside and call 9-1-1. But Chomina pounded on the door, broke in through a kitchen-window screen, grabbed his daughter, stormed off to his pickup and drove away.
While sheriff's deputies were taking a statement from the girl's mother, Chomina called and agreed to bring the girl to her grandmother at an Anaheim burger joint. The toddler was eventually returned to her mother safely. But Chomina again fled.
He was captured the next day by Orange police at a residence in that city and arrested on suspicion of kidnapping, assault with a firearm, first-degree burglary and possession of a firearm by a felon, among other charges.
Chomina pleaded guilty in February to one felony count of
kidnapping, one felony count of first-degree residential burglary, two
misdemeanor counts of assault with a firearm and one misdemeanor count
of possession of a firearm by a felon (for a 2005 conviction for the sale
and transportation of a controlled substance).
He was sentenced this week to four years and four
months in state prison.
The latest sad chapter in his life lengthens a rap sheet that, before that day in July 2009, already included driving under the influence, drinking in public, drug possession, and sale and transportation of a controlled substance.
A week before Chomina went loco, he pleaded guilty to making telephone calls with the intent to annoy.
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.