Suspected shooter in University Place double homicide gets decades in prison
Judge Kitty-Ann van Doorninck wanted to know the motive behind a double homicide that happened in University Place last year.
“The big question is why?” the Pierce County Superior Court judge asked 31-year-old Javier Valenzuela Felix before she sentenced him Wednesday. “Can you answer that for me?”
Defense attorney Ed DeCosta told her he’d been asking that question for a year to no avail.
Valenzuela Felix pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder for the deaths of Wilberth Lopez Alcala and Adrian Valencia Cuevas.
Van Doorninck sentenced him to 30 years, 6 months in prison, which was the low-end of his sentencing range. That’s what both the defense and prosecution recommended.
The plea statement she read in court said that Valenzuela Felix shot the men after they drank beer together at a barbecue May 14, 2018. They’d left the gathering together with another man, Alex Lopez Leon, to go for a drive.
Sheriff’s deputies found the bodies in the 6100 block of 63rd Street West after a neighbor called to report what looked like two men passed out inside the vehicle.
Lopez Leon, 22, awaits trial.
Van Doorninck said the case was especially cold-blooded.
Both men were shot in the head essentially at point blank range, she said. Charging papers say 22-year-old Lopez Alcala was shot first, then 19-year-old Valencia Cuevas was told to keep driving, and then was also shot.
“It’s sort of unspeakable, how evil that is,” van Doorninck said.
Adrian Valencia Cuevas’ mother, Rosa Valencia Cuevas, asked the court for a maximum sentence.
She said Valenzuela Felix destroyed her life.
“He left a mother without a son and a son without a father,” she said.
She said she doesn’t know Valenzuela Felix but that she always thinks about his mother and how she’s also suffering.
“In my heart, there cannot be any hate,” she said.
A victim advocate read the court a letter from Elizabeth Ulloa, Valencia Cuevas’ girlfriend and the mother of his 1-year-old son.
“This man Javier is a monster,” the letter said.
Ulloa told The News Tribune outside court that she and Valencia Cuevas had talked about getting a place of their own.
“He had a lot planned in his life,” she said. “And now none of that can happen.”
He’d worked in construction, she said, and wanted to get a union job.
She described him as a good father, who loved his mother and his siblings.
America Ceras, whose husband was best friends with Lopez Alcala, wrote the court to say he’d been an excellent uncle to her daughters.
She told The News Tribune that he’d lived with the couple in Tacoma and that he’d take her daughters to the corner store to get ice cream. She’d often find them headed out the door to McDonald’s.
He didn’t have any children.
He’d worked in construction for a different company and sent money from every paycheck to family in Mexico, she said.
Defense attorney DeCosta told the court that his client was remorseful about what happened and wanted to take responsibility.
He has no known felony criminal history.
DeCosta said he found the man to be soft spoken, rational and reserved and that he has several young children of his own.
Valenzuela Felix himself told the judge through a Spanish interpreter that he was very sorry about what happened.
He didn’t answer her question about why it did.
