After more than five hours of deliberation, a Lucas County Common Pleas Court jury found Antonio Hernandez, Jr., guilty of the 2022 murder of 18-year-old Keichell Cardell.
Hernandez was found guilty of felonious assault and murder. However, the jury found him not guilty of the first and most serious count, murder with the intent to kill.
The decision came late Friday night after a weeklong trial that culminated in a dramatic final day that began with Hernandez testifying as the sole witness in his own defense.
In his testimony, he offered a differing version of events at a Washington Township home that led up to Ms. Cardell’s Dec. 18, 2022 death than the prosecution’s narrative. While he did not deny that he shot and killed Ms. Cardell, Hernandez claimed he did so in self-defense.
Earlier in the week, the prosecutor described Hernandez, who was 17 at the time, as drunkenly waving around a loaded gun trying to “act hard” several times over the course of the night before Ms. Cardell, of Toledo, was shot.
In contrast, while Hernandez admitted the group was drinking and doing drugs that night, he claimed everything was peaceful until Ms. Cardell instigated the violence. Hernandez said Ms. Cardell learned he was having sexual relations in a bedroom with her girlfriend and angrily grabbed a knife and lunged at him, forcing him to shoot her in self-defense.
Hernandez faces 15 years to life in prison, plus three years on the firearms specification, when Judge Cook sentences him July 23.
In closing arguments Friday afternoon, assistant county Prosecutor Brooks Fowler dismissed Hernandez’s version of events.
“The knife is a smokescreen. Don’t fall for it,” Mr. Fowler told the jury.
He suggested instead that the knife, which officers and witnesses at the scene ignored and which was on the kitchen counter in a different room than Ms. Cardell’s body, only became relevant when Hernandez needed to develop his self-defense claim.
He continued to call into question Hernandez’s behavior that evening, asking, if he had acted in self-defense, why he removed evidence, fled the scene, and did not turn himself in until an arrest warrant was issued and police had gathered at his house.
Mr. Fowler reminded the jury Hernandez’s version of events conflicted with everyone else’s that night.
After taking the jury through the evidence that had already been presented, Mr. Fowler turned his attention to the necessary elements for a self-defense claim. He focused his argument on two of the five possible elements available to negate any claim of self-defense.
In particular, he argued that Hernandez’s gun both created a dangerous environment that night and constituted unnecessary force, even if Ms. Cardell had a knife. And second, he argued that the victim, whom all the witnesses described as mild-mannered, likely did not attack Hernandez with a knife in a murderous rage.
In his closing arguments, Hernandez’s attorney, Ronnie Wingate, told the jury the case was more complicated than the prosecution let on.
“We admit that we did the shooting,” Mr. Wingate repeated multiple times. “But the simplicity ends at that point. Now the state has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that that doesn’t meet the standard of self defense.”
He urged the jury members to put themselves in his client’s shoes, those of a scared 17-year-old boy, to determine whether his actions were reasonable, while asserting that waving a gun around did not make his client an instigator.
Instead, as Mr. Wingate took the knife from evidence and displayed it for the jury, he questioned why the police never gathered it, why it was never tested for DNA, and pointed out that one witness identified the knife as Ms. Cardell’s.
In rebuttal, county Prosecutor Erin Kennedy took exception with arguments of self defense.
“This is a convenient story being tied together so the defendant can escape responsibility for taking another human’s life,” she said, before describing Hernandez as a “hothead interrupted trying to have sex.”
After rehashing the testimony describing the events from that evening and the standards for self-defense one more time, she described the other options Hernandez could have taken rather than shooting to kill, over Mr. Wingate’s overruled objections.
Lastly, she accused Hernandez of “not only taking [Ms. Cardell’s] life, but her name by lying on her in death.”
While the chaos from that December evening — as described by both sides’ testimony — appears to have prevented the jury from finding Hernandez guilty of murder with intent to kill, the guilty verdict on the second and third counts suggests they were not convinced by the defense’s evidence of Ms. Cardell as the aggressor.
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