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LOS ANGELES (CNS) - A man who owned a marjiuana dispensary and the business' manager were sentenced Thursday to 25 years to life in prison for murdering a community college student whose remains were found in a remote area of the Mojave Desert nearly two months after he went missing in South Los Angeles.
Superior Court Judge Mark Hanasono tacked on an additional one-year sentence for dispensary owner Weijia Peng in connection with an allegation stemming from his use of a syringe filled with a deadly dose of ketamine during the Sept. 22, 2020, attack on 21-year-old Juan Carlos Hernandez.
Peng, 34, of Alhambra, and co-defendant Ethan Kedar Astaphan, 30, of San Gabriel, were convicted Feb. 26 of first-degree murder for the slaying of Hernandez, who was a student at El Camino College in Torrance.
Deputy District Attorney Habib Balian said the two men suspected that Hernandez was stealing from the dispensary where he worked, although law enforcement found no proof to back up the allegation made in messages that Peng and Astaphan had written each other in the days before the young man's killing.
A forensic expert was able to recover images that were deleted from a DVR containing security video at the dispensary, which shows Astaphan confronting the victim from behind and taking him down to the ground in a chokehold and Peng injecting the fatal dose of ketamine, according to the prosecutor.
Wearing a T-shirt with a photo of her son, Yajaira Hernandez, told the judge that her son was "so senselessly and cruelly taken away from me" in what she called a "premeditated and vicious attack," and said it has left "a hole in my heart and a void in my life."
The victim's mother said she posted thousands of fliers and did everything she could to find her son after he disappeared, and that she wound up being subjected to phone calls from strangers with ransom messages before authorities gave her the "crushing" news in November 2020 that her son's remains had been found.
Speaking directly to the defendants, she said, "You took everything from me. ... You will never understand how you've changed our lives."
She told the two that "at the end, no one won," noting that the defendants have lost their freedom and she has lost her beloved son. She said she is disturbed by the thought that the two could ever be released from prison.
The victim's aunt said the victim was "like a son to me," saying he was taken in a "senseless act" that leaves "a wound that will never heal."
She said she hoped that Peng and Astaphan would be "punished to the fullest extent of the law."
The Los Angeles Police Department's Robbery-Homicide Division worked with the FBI to investigate Hernandez's disappearance, and "their efforts provided detectives with a sequence of events to find Hernandez," according to a police statement.
Search teams using cadaver dogs found the young man's remains in a shallow grave along Afton Canyon Road, east of Interstate 15, north of Barstow.
Astaphan was arrested in November 2020 in connection with the killing, and Peng was returned to Southern California two years later from Turkey. They have remained behind bars since then, jail records show.