Killer Of LA County Deputy Found Legally Sane, Faces Life Without Parole

LOS ANGELES, CA — A man who gunned down a Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy at a stoplight in Palmdale three years ago was legally sane at the time of the crime, a jury decided Wednesday.

The jury's decision — reached after about 1 1/2 days of deliberations — means Kevin Eduardo Cataneo Salazar, 32, faces a life prison term without the possibility of parole for the killing of Deputy Ryan Clinkunbroomer.

Salazar is due back before Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Ronald S. Coen for sentencing Oct. 1.

Salazar was convicted last week of first-degree murder for the Sept. 16, 2023, slaying of Clinkunbroomer, a fourth-generation member of the sheriff's department.

Jurors also found true the special circumstance allegations of murder of a peace officer, lying in wait and firing from a vehicle, along with allegations that he personally used and discharged a .22-caliber revolver.

Salazar, a Palmdale resident, had entered a dual plea of not guilty and not guilty by reason of insanity in connection with the killing, so his conviction prompted a sanity phase of the trial that ended earlier this week.

If he had been found insane at the time of the crime, the defendant would have been sent to a state hospital for treatment.

Outside court, the defendant's sister, Jessica Salazar, said of the verdict, "It's sad. It's sad and so unfair. I understand he was an officer and it hurts us all as well."

But she maintained that her brother had a documented mental condition that "wasn't invented" and dated back to 2019.

"... We were asking for help. We were not asking for freedom," she said. "Once the trial started, we knew that it wasn't going to be fair. He's an officer and we're just civilians."

Sheriff Robert Luna was in the downtown Los Angeles courtroom when the sanity verdict was read. He and Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman were expected to speak with reporters about the case Wednesday afternoon.

Clinkunbroomer — who had become engaged to be married four days before he was killed — was shot in the back of the head while in a marked patrol SUV near the sheriff's Palmdale station and was rushed to Antelope Valley Medical Center in grave condition. He was pronounced dead that night.

Defense attorney George Rosenstock had urged the jury in his closing argument during the sanity phase of the trial to find that his client was insane at the time of the crime, while Deputy District Attorney David Ayvazian argued that Salazar was legally sane when he killed the 30-year-old law enforcement officer.

"The verdict is no kind of mercy. Don't think that," Salazar's attorney told the panel.

The defense lawyer noted that his client had been diagnosed with schizophrenia in 2019.

Rosenstock said the defendant suffered from a "delusional framework," including auditory hallucinations and a belief that he was being controlled by satellites and that he was being electrocuted.

The defense lawyer noted that three doctors who examined Salazar and looked at his medical records concluded that his client was legally insane at the time of the killing, contending that the defendant did not have the capacity to distinguish what was morally right or wrong at the time.

Rosenstock had told jurors at the start of the trial's sanity phase that a not guilty by reason of insanity verdict "does not contradict your first verdict."

The prosecutor told the jury in his closing argument that he was not questioning whether Salazar had been diagnosed as schizophrenic, while maintaining that "mental illness is not legal insanity."

"... He made his target a reality. He practiced for what he wanted to do," Ayvazian said of the defendant being captured on surveillance video at a shooting range in Lancaster four days before the killing.

He noted that Salazar "took the long way home" and not the "wrong way home" after firing on the deputy.

The prosecutor attacked the testimony of the three doctors called during the defense's portion of the case, and maintained that the defendant was "of sound mind" at the time.

Ayvazian said the most significant moment in the sanity phase of the case was the defendant's mother, Marle, testifying that her son had asked her the night of the killing what she was looking at as she got a notification on her phone about the deputy's killing and that he responded, "Wow," after seeing a photo of the slain deputy before walking out of the kitchen.

Through a Spanish interpreter, Salazar's mother told jurors last week that she had told her son that a police officer had been killed and that he asked if she had a picture of the officer, which she showed him.

She said "you could see that he was sad," although she acknowledged telling detectives that her son was calm.

"Did he tell you that he killed a police officer from that moment until his arrest?" Deputy District Attorney Michael Blake asked.

"No," she said, telling jurors that she had "no idea something like that had happened."

Marle Salazar testified that her son's first stay at a hospital occurred in 2019 after he had not slept for days and stared at the wall. She said he initially didn't want to tell her what he was looking at, then said it was "something like the devil ... diabolical" when she insisted on knowing.

She said he walked to the kitchen, took the lid off the trash can and "went head first into the trash."

"He said that he wasn't worth anything, that he didn't deserve anything," she said, adding that one of her daughters picked him up out of the trash.

"He walked to the bathroom and he stuck his head in the toilet," the defendant's mother told jurors. "His whole head was inside and in the water. I took him out and he was screaming — to stop the voices ... We took him to the living room ... He threw himself on the ground."

"He was screaming. He would yell, `God help me,"' she said, noting that she and her daughter began praying for him and that she asked another one of her daughters to call 911.

"Just before they (the paramedics) were going to take him, he changed his behavior and he looked like a small child. He wanted to hug me," she said.

She said that he was hospitalized for about five days in March 2019 after being taken to the hospital and that she took responsibility for making sure he took his pills when he returned home.

She said he wound up in a hospital again in October 2019 after he stopped taking his medication and was "seeing things" and "hearing things."

She said she saw her son come down the stairs in their home "like he was fighting with someone ... saying, `No, no, no."'

"And I would ask him, `Are you hearing things?' He would say, `No, no, no,"' the defendant's mother said. "He would say he was worthless ... He had already tried to take his own life twice."

On another occasion in 2020, she said her son was "talking about satellites" and told her that he was "being electrocuted on his private parts," she said, noting that she "saw him walk in a different manner from the pain he was experiencing."

She said she had trouble getting her son to take his medication between hospital stays.

The defendant's mother said she got a phone call in 2021 warning her that her son might get hurt because he was on the side of the street and was flipping off motorists, resulting in a three-week hospital stay for him. She said he was taking his medication until he started his visits at another facility and noticed that his condition deteriorated after he stopped taking the medication.

"I didn't know my son had a weapon," she said, while acknowledging that she may have known by the end of 2022 that her husband had firearms in the house and that she had heard that their son had gone with him once to a shooting range. She said she saw targets taped to the wall in her son's room.

Of her son's drug use, she said, "It wasn't that he was addicted to marijuana. He would try it on those days (where) he couldn't sleep."

She said her son's symptoms weren't present all of the time.

"There were better times. There were worse times," she said.

Blake told jurors that Salazar was initially following a Los Angeles County sheriff's sergeant who wound up pulling into the sheriff's station, but turned his attention to Clinkunbroomer and made a U-turn to follow him and stalk "his prey" as the deputy pulled his patrol SUV out of the station.

The crime appeared to have been motivated by retaliation because the defendant "blamed the government and police for his own disappointments," Blake said.

Salazar's attorney countered during the trial's guilt phase that "impulse is inconsistent with deliberation," questioning the prosecution's assertion that Salazar was capable of premeditation and deliberation.

"You can't ignore what they haven't proved," he said then of the prosecution's case.

In his rebuttal argument, Ayvazian said Salazar had told two undercover operatives in jail during a surreptitiously recorded conversation after his arrest that he had wanted to kill a police officer for years and described following officers, parking and waiting and playing music to prepare himself. The defendant also told the operatives that he had gone to a candlelight vigil at the station the night after the deputy's killing, the prosecutor said, adding that it showed that Salazar was "enjoying the anonymity of what he's done."

Investigators didn't initially know who had shot and killed Clinkunbroomer, but used surveillance video footage to identify a vehicle believed to be a Toyota Corolla and then to ask the public to come forward with any information about the vehicle.

Among those who contacted investigators was a motorist who testified that he took a photo of the license plate of a vehicle whose driver had aggressively confronted him about seven minutes before authorities believe Clinkunbroomer was shot. The motorist identified Salazar in court during a 2024 hearing as that driver.

Authorities used the license plate number shown in the photo taken by the motorist and determined that someone living at Salazar's house had a registered .22-caliber firearm, with detectives subsequently getting an arrest warrant for Salazar and a search warrant for his home, where a .22-caliber revolver was discovered, according to evidence presented at the 2024 hearing.

At a June 2024 hearing in which Salazar was ordered to stand trial, Los Angeles County Sheriff's Homicide Detective Gustavo Carrillo testified that Salazar acknowledged his involvement in the shooting during questioning at the Palmdale station by detectives two days after the killing. Salazar told investigators that he felt bad and "cried for the (expletive) officer," according to the detective.

Under cross-examination by Salazar's attorney at the 2024 hearing, the detective acknowledged that when asked why he had shot the deputy, Salazar responded that it had "started a long time ago before COVID" and that he "began to hear voices in his head."

The slain deputy was honored in January with the Castaic Sports Complex being renamed the Ryan M. Clinkunbroomer Castaic Sports Complex.

By Terri Vermeulen Keith, City News Service