SANTA CRUZ — A man convicted of gang-related first-degree murder last month was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole Tuesday.
Jason Cortez, a 29-year-old from Watsonville, was found guilty of murdering his Santa Cruz County Jail cellmate German Carrillo on Oct. 13, 2019. A third cellmate, Mario Lozano, was also found guilty in a separate trial in November and sentenced to multiple life sentences for both Carrillo’s murder and the 2004 murder of 17-year-old Isaac Guzman in Watsonville.
All three cellmates were located in a unit for designated active gang members. Carrillo was in custody on murder charges and awaiting trial, Lozano was in custody on murder charges and Cortez, who had been involved in Watsonville gangs as young as 12 and had served in a position of a gang authority during stints in jail and prison, was in custody on firearms charges.
In 2019, Carrillo, 24, was stabbed, strangled and suffocated in his cell. While Lozano was found guilty of first-degree murder, Cortez delivered testimony at his trial that he witnessed Carrillo’s slaying by Lozano but denied direct involvement in it. However, Santa Cruz County Assistant District Attorney Ilia McKinney argued that Cortez was a willful accomplice as part of a larger jail gang conspiracy to fatally punish Carrillo for misusing his access to fellow gang members’ commissary account personal identification numbers to call his mother and girlfriend. Cortez testified that he flushed the shank Lozano used, helped move Carrillo’s dead body onto his bed and deceived jail personnel by picking up Carrillo’s meals.
Several of Carrillo’s family members sat in the courtroom gallery, some of them wearing shirts memorializing Carrillo, as Judge Stephen Siegel read Cortez’s sentence. Victim advocate Sonia Sahota read an impact statement by Carrillo’s younger sister Tania Santana, who wrote that Carrillo knew exactly what he wanted to do when he left jail, including buy a home for his parents, get married and have kids.
“He had a future plan that was taken from him,” she wrote.
Santana wrote that Carrillo’s death has impacted her and her family.
“I never thought that my brother was never going to be in my life,” she wrote. “Seeing my mother in pain every holiday or birthday is hard because I don’t know how to console her because I don’t know her pain of losing her child. A mother should never bury her child, it should always be the other way around.”
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Santana also addressed Cortez to ask why he did not help Carrillo.
“If you saw how they were killing him, why not help German out?” she asked. “Why would you allow someone to kill him if you say you’re so innocent? Why let my brother’s body lay there for 24 hours?”
Santana thanked McKinney for helping her family through the trial.
“I know that my brother can rest in peace now that he got justice,” she wrote.
Cortez delivered his own statement offering condolences to Carrillo’s family and acknowledging the grief they have gone through and the anger they feel toward him. However, he felt that justice had not actually been served since other inmates who were part of the conspiracy were not charged, emphasized that he was the only person in his unit to testify and felt fearful during the situation.
“There is no combination of words that can take away the grief you have endured,” he said.
Cortez was sentenced to life in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation without the possibility of parole or entitlement to pre-custody credits. He will also be ordered to pay restitution to the Carrillo family in an amount to be determined. Zach Schwarzbach, Cortez’s attorney, requested it be a joint recitation with Lozano co-signing.