A state appeals court on Monday upheld the murder conviction of a Long Beach man who drunkenly crashed into a couple and their 3-year-old son as they walked home from trick-or-treating on Halloween night in 2019.
The 20-year-old driver, Carlo Navarro, had downed shots of Jack Daniel’s and was speeding through the Los Cerritos neighborhood when he hit Joseph Awaida and Raihan Dakhil as they pushed their son Omar in a stroller.
“Navarro drove his SUV between approximately 30 to 40 miles per hour over the speed limit down a residential street on Halloween evening when people were out walking,” Justice Gregory J. Weingart wrote. “He did not slow down but instead continued to accelerate. He flew through multiple stop signs without stopping. He was moving at such a high speed that he lost control and drove onto the sidewalk.”
Navarro showed wanton disregard for human life that justifies a murder conviction, according to Weingart.
Despite this, the three-judge panel was split on the decision, with one justice, Frances Rothschild, arguing the murder conviction should be overturned. Jurors, she wrote, should not have been shown close-up images of Omar and Raihan’s bodies. These autopsy photos “are shocking,” she wrote, but they had little use in proving the prosecution’s case other than eliciting “great anger” from anyone who saw them.
Instead, Rothschild argued, the prosecution should have relied on experts to describe the extent of the violence lest they risk inflaming jurors’ emotions.
“Testimony describing the injuries of a dead child simply does not have the same impact as images of a dead child—some close-up enough that the jury could notice small, intimate details about his face and body,” she wrote.
In his majority opinion, Weingart dismissed this argument. Letting jurors see the horror of the wounds for themselves “showed how wantonly Navarro was acting when he inflicted those injuries.”
Navarro also argued his murder conviction should be thrown out because jurors weren’t allowed to hear evidence that would have made him more sympathetic.
During his trial in 2022, the judge blocked testimony from a police officer that Navarro asked to take a knee and pray for the Awaida family while he was waiting to have his blood drawn for a DUI test.
This testimony, Weingart wrote, would have been irrelevant anyway: It came too late to show any concern for the lives of the victims.
Navarro “had already killed the Awaida family hours before the time he asked to take a knee and pray. His belated request to pray for people he had already killed thus had no relevance to whether he acted with conscious disregard of human life when Joseph, Raihan, and Omar were still alive and capable of being helped.”
Navarro, now 25, is currently serving a sentence of 25 years to life in prison for three counts of second-degree murder and three lesser counts of vehicular manslaughter. He was sentenced in 2022 to 10 years in prison for the manslaughter charges and 15 to life for the murder charges.
Navarro did not challenge the manslaughter convictions, but if the murder convictions had been thrown out, his sentence would have been drastically shortened, leaving only the 10-year prison term as a penalty.
Vera Awaida, Joseph’s mother, said she was relieved to hear Navarro will stay behind bars for longer, but it did little to ease her grief.
“It doesn’t make a difference if it’s three months, three minutes or three decades,” she said. “They’re still gone.”
Nearly five years after their deaths, she’s still unable to bear visiting Joseph, Raihan and Omar’s graves.
“The reality is, I’m still waiting for them to come home,” she said.
The liquor store owner who gave Navarro the bottle of Jack Daniel’s has since admitted to the crime and accepted a lifetime ban from working in the alcohol business.