Appeals court upholds conviction that man jealously gunned down rival on Terminal Island

A state appeals court panel today upheld a Carson man’s conviction for a murder that was caught on surveillance video on Terminal Island just over eight years ago.

The three-justice panel from California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal rejected the defense’s contention that there was insufficient evidence that Bryan Gallegos acted with premeditation and deliberation and that his first-degree murder conviction should be reversed or reduced to second-degree murder for the Sept. 4, 2016, shooting death of Armando Amaya Jr., 21, of San Pedro.

The panel found that “substantial evidence indicated defendant acted with jealous motive” in killing Amaya, who had briefly dated Gallegos’ ex-girlfriend and was riding in a vehicle with her before Gallegos told him to get out of the car.

The appellate court justices noted that there was ample evidence Gallegos had taken a gun to a Long Beach business, trailed his ex-girlfriend’s car at close range and had a long-standing jealousy of his former girlfriend’s male companions.

“Defendant urges that the video is ‘consistent with’ an accidental firing of the gun after the victim tried unsuccessfully to grab defendant’s weapon. Critically, notwithstanding the video’s imperfections, there is no actual evidence of an accident, either within the video or in the other evidence presented at trial, and much of the evidence is to the contrary,” the panel found in its 10-page ruling.

Amaya was found dead in the 300 block of Hanjin Road in the Terminal Island area of Long Beach, police said.

Gallegos was also convicted of assault with a deadly weapon for subsequently crashing into a truck containing a Long Beach police detective, part of a team of investigators who had staked out his vehicle in Wilmington just over a month later.

Gallegos accelerated his gray Chevrolet Impala at a “high rate of speed,” striking the left portion of a detective’s truck, narrowly missing a second vehicle containing two other detectives and driving toward another detective before he was shot and wounded by two of the detectives from the Long Beach Police Department’s Career Criminal Apprehension Team, according to a November 2018 report from the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office that found the detectives who shot the defendant on Oct. 7, 2016 were “justified in their use of deadly force.”

The report noted that surveillance cameras showed Gallegos driving his vehicle to the scene of Amaya’s murder and initiating a brief confrontation with the victim before shooting him in the head.

Gallegos, now 33, was sentenced in March 2023 to 53 years to life in state prison.

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