While having dinner and drinks at Tortilla Flats in Mission Viejo with his girlfriend and another couple late on April 5, 2005, the unimaginable happened that shocked and angered Jon David Tafoya's sense of decency.
The other woman playfully licked between his girlfriend's breasts, sending 28-year-old Tafoya into a rage that he claims made it impossible for him to think straight.
Tafoya stormed out of the restaurant, drove his Chevy pickup erratically, got stopped by an Orange County Sheriff's Department deputy, disobeyed orders to turn the engine off, instead sped away at 90 mph driving on the wrong side of the road and ultimately killed two innocent folks in another car after a head-on crash.
Tafoya claimed in the aftermath that it wasn't the booze and drugs that fueled his anger but rather he temporarily lost his mind after witnessing an act of lesbianism that offended his moral standards.
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The Downey man's moral outrage is puzzling because his criminal record includes convictions for a prior DUI, cocaine possession and, yes, masturbating in front of a 14-year-old girl.
At trial, veteran Orange County District Attorney's office prosecutor Howard Gundy noted the defendant had booze (beer and tequila), cocaine and marijuana in his blood on the night of the crash, according to court records.
Gundy convinced a jury to approve two counts of second degree murder and in March 2008 a superior court judge sentenced the defendant to prison.
Tafoya appealed the case to a California Court of Appeal based in Santa Ana and lost.
Most recently, he requested that a federal judge overturn the convictions for a new trial on claims that include: jurors should have convicted him of a lesser crime, involuntary manslaughter; and Gary Pohlson, his retained lawyer, provided inadequate legal representation by failing to inform him of right to testify on his own behalf.
This month, U.S. District Court Judge Christina A. Snyder considered a magistrate judge's report and negative recommendation on the claims and agreed to reject all the contentions as legally worthless.
Upshot: Tafoya, now 33, will continue to serve his 15 years to life punishment inside the California Institution For Men at Chino. His name is now a number: 12832. But at least he is safe from lesbian acts.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.
