On Monday, San Francisco Superior Court Judge Charles Haines ordered 25-year old El Sobrante resident Edwin Ramos to serve three consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole for the murder of Anthony Bologna and his two sons.
A jury convicted Ramos last month of three counts of first-degree murder stemming from a 2008 incident when Ramos, allegedly a member of the MS-13 gang, mistook the Bologna family, who were driving back from a picnic, for a members of a rival gang and fired at the family's car at an intersection in San Francisco's Excelsior neighborhood.
"There's not a day that goes by that that's not on my mind," Ramos said at Monday's sentencing, Bay City News reported. "If I could go back in time and trade places with any of them, I would."
Ramos initially claimed he had nothing to do with the shooting; however, he eventually admitted to driving the car used in the incident but insisted it was someone else who pulled the trigger. Ramos has said the deed was done by fellow alleged MS-13 member Wilfredo "Flaco" Reyes, who has to date evaded capture by police.
The shooting's sole survivor, Tony's son Andrew, identified Ramos as the perpetrator. "I saw him," he testified tearfully during the trial earlier this year. "He was staring at my dad, mugging him, giving him a mean look, and that's when he pulled out a gun…They shot my family like that, it doesn't make any sense."
Even though the jury convicted Ramos on the murder charges, it was unable to reach a consensus on whether Ramos was the one who fired gun.
Ramos's attorney, Marla Zamora, has called for retrial citing confusing jury instructions, allegations that one of the jurors engaged in prohibited outside research and Bologna's widow, Danielle, visibly having emotional outbursts in the courtroom.
"The widow was in the first row every day in front of the jurors," Zamora told the San Francisco Examiner. “Jurors could hear. We complained about it right and left.”
"I lost my family, my life in San Francisco and our house and all the memories we shared in our home," KTVU reported Danielle Bologna told Ramos during the sentencing. "My pain is so deep you can't even imagine."
Ramos' case drew national scrutiny to the San Francisco Police Department's "sanctuary city" policy. Ramos, an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador, was convicted of assault in 2004 but the incident was not reported to federal immigration authorities because he was under 18 years of age at the time.
Following Ramos's arrest, and the national anti-immigrant firestorm it ignited, then-Mayor Gavin Newsom went back on his previous support of the policy and soon reversed it.