Orange County's grand jury has indicted 17-year-old Ryan Nichols Coale for March's fatal stabbing of a visiting teen on an athletic court at Sycamore Junior High School in Anaheim. Coale, who is being tried as an adult, was indicted on one felony count of murder
and a sentencing enhancement for the personal use of a deadly weapon. The district attorney's office originally charged the Anaheim resident with the same counts, but a grand jury indictment removes the need for a preliminary hearing.
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Around 7 p.m. on March 19, Coale was playing handball with three friends on the north side athletic courts at Sycamore, where 19-year-old Edgar Cervantes of Riverside was playing
basketball with four friends.
As Cervantes prepared to leave, he ran into
someone he'd had confrontations with in the past, according to a statement from the DA's office, which continues to allege a shouting match escalated into a fight between the two groups that resulted in Coale whipping out out a small knife and plunging it into the chest of Cervantes.
The bloodied man's friends rushed him to Anaheim Memorial Hospital and called 9-1-1 to report the stabbing. Cervantes died at the hospital.
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Anaheim Police investigators arrested Coale a day after the confrontation.
Edgar Cervantes, OC Homicide No. 7: Stabbed in Fight
Coale, who pleaded not guilty to the charges against him, faces up to 26 years to life in state
prison with a conviction.
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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.