Adrian 'AJ' Gonzalez has been ordered to remain in prison following a lengthy jury trial to determine whether he remains a potential threat to the public.
A jury on Wednesday returned their verdict, which was not guilty or not guilty — Gonzalez previously pleaded guilty to killing eight-year-old Maddy Middleton in 2015 — but was concerning whether he should be eligible for parole given the heinousness of his crime. Under state law, even a murder, if it's committed when the offender was a juvenile, only keeps one in prison until age 25, and Gonzalez turned 25 last year.
A judge in Santa Cruz County ruled last summer that Gonzalez, who had never stood trial for the crime, should face a trial and jury before determining whether he should be freed.
After a months-long trial and two days of deliberations, the jury determined that Gonzalez should remain in juvenile detention, as KTVU reports. Per the Santa Cruz Sentinel, this means he will remain jailed another two years, and it's not clear if he will then face a standard parole hearing.
As SFist previously reported, the jury heard from a number of witnesses, including psychiatrists who evaluated Gonzalez, and from Gonzalez himself. On the stand last month, Gonzalez described the day he decided to kill Middleton, his neighbor, so that he could abuse her body sexually before taking his own life.
During his testimony, Gonzalez expressed little emotion about the crime, and said that after he had strangled Middleton and stabbed her in her neck, and then disposed of the body in a garbage bin, he casually went out for Chipotle with another friend in the building.
A Stanford professor who assessed Gonzalez for the trial said that he did not have all the markers for psychopathy, but that he scored 17 on the standard test — higher than 13, which is average or "normal," but not the psychopathy treshhold of 30.
"This was an incredibly difficult case from 2015 and the impact that it has had on the community and we are still feeling the rippling effects of it almost 10 years later," said prosecuting attorney Tara George in a statement. "The work and effort that was put in by everyone involved in our community to keep all of us safe was a tireless effort on behalf of our jurors and so we thank them for their service."
