A Calimesa man who gunned down his neighbor over a property dispute involving his mother was convicted Friday of first-degree murder.
A Riverside jury deliberated less than a day before finding Rex Carl Edwards guilty of killing 55-year-old Susan Perez.
Along with the murder count, jurors convicted the 62-year-old defendant of a sentence-enhancing gun use allegation. He’s facing 50 years to life in state prison when he’s sentenced by Riverside County Superior Court Judge Charles Koosed on Dec. 7 at the Riverside Hall of Justice.
During his closing statement on Thursday, Deputy District Attorney Dan Fox portrayed Edwards as a callous perpetrator at odds with Perez over her use of a neighboring doublewide trailer at the Big Oak Gardens Mobile Home Park in the 35000 block of Chandler Avenue.
“He didn’t want to kill her and get away with it,” Fox told jurors. “He just wanted to kill her.”
Edwards and his mother, Rose Marie Hopkins, had been engaged in an eight-year-long conflict with Perez, who was caretaker for Hopkins’ immediate neighbor, Charles Williams.
The two women had verbally jousted on numerous occasions, evidently because they had a mutual romantic interest in Williams, according to trial testimony.
When the terminally ill man died, there were questions as to the disposition of his mobile home and lot, which Edwards and his mother had an apparent desire to acquire, Fox said.
On the evening of Aug. 8, 2017, less than two days after Williams’ death, Edwards went to the unit to shut down the air conditioner and check around inside, at which point he encountered Perez and her boyfriend, Michael Lamoureux, according to the prosecution.
Edwards tried to force them out of the home, sparking a fistfight between him and Lamoureux, who landed several blows that injured the defendant, sending him back to his mother’s trailer, witnesses testified.
Edwards recovered over the next few days, but Fox theorized that the defendant and his mother continued to obsess that Perez would not leave the adjacent property. On the night of Aug. 12, 2017, Perez and Lamoureux returned to the park, from which they had departed after the fight, to collect her belongings. According to Fox, Edwards at that point was boiling over and wanted to permanently remove Perez from his and his mother’s lives.
As the victim and Lamoureux were walking to the latter’s vehicle with clothes and other items, the defendant jumped from behind a hedgerow, ran to within a couple of feet of Perez and opened fire with a .25-caliber handgun, shooting her in the side of the head, as well as in the upper and lower back, according to sheriff’s investigators.
She died at the scene.
Edwards waited with the pistol in his hand for deputies to come and surrendered peacefully. According to testimony, he told detectives that he had to kill Perez because he feared she might hurt his mother.
Deputy Public Defender Linda Moore told jurors that Edwards feared for his mother’s safety, but also argued that he was in a psychotic state and behaving irrationally.
“Rex saw Susan as an imminent threat and acted on the belief that he needed to eliminate that threat,” Moore said.
The attorney cited instances in which Perez had made “death threats” against the defendant’s mother, who had resided in the park for 28 years.
“Rose Marie Hopkins was fearful of Susan and believed she was in danger,” Moore told the jury. “Rex believed his mother would be attacked if he didn’t do something.”
Moore said a neighbor heard Perez shouting profanities on the night of the shooting, seemingly aimed at Hopkins, though no one testified specifically to that.
The attorney insisted that her client confronted Perez in a “panic” because he believed “when Susan showed up, that was it for his mom.”
Although Lamoureux was standing right behind Perez when Edwards shot her, the defendant did not turn the gun on him.
Edwards, who’s being held without bail at the Robert Presley Jail in Riverside, had no documented prior felony convictions.
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