A 38-year-old man was acquitted on Wednesday, Sept. 2 of second-degree murder for a fatal 2021 freeway crash in Irvine that killed his niece, but was convicted of a lesser charge of injuring his niece’s friend while driving under the influence.
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Jim Christopher Rosado was sentenced to five years in prison shortly after the jury verdict on Wednesday morning. But, due to the time he has spent in local jail while awaiting trial, Rosado already has served his time behind bars and will be released.
Rosado was driving northbound on the I-5 between Yale and Culver avenues early in the morning on June 13, 2021 when his vehicle went off the roadway, collided with several objects on the roadside — including a traffic sign, a metal guardrail, an electrical box and a metal pole — as the vehicle went airborne and then rolled over and came to rest in trees and shrubbery, according to court filings from both the prosecution and defense.
Rosado’s niece, 18-year-old Vanessa Ramirez, was partially thrown from a backseat window and killed. Her 19-year-old friend suffered a broken clavicle, but survived. Rosado was apparently uninjured, but the lawyers wrote that a blood test found signs of methamphetamine, amphetamine and morphine or heroin in his system.
Ramirez and her friend had gone to a party in Oceanside. Around 3 a.m., Ramirez called her uncle, saying she and her friend were stranded and needed a ride home.
Rosado, who was in Bell at the time, agreed to make the nearly 200-mile roundtrip to pick up his niece and her friend and bring them back to the Los Angeles area, court records show.
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Rosado arrived in Oceanside around 4:30 a.m., court records show. His niece and her friend, exhausted by that point, got into the back seat of Rosado’s 2005 Honda Accord, his attorney wrote in a trial brief.
Around 5:30 a.m., other drivers saw Rosado driving erratically at more than 90 mph, according to a prosecution trial brief. After nearly striking other vehicles, prosecutors allege, Rosado veered across multiple freeway lanes and went off the roadway.
Prosecutors, in arguing for a second-degree murder conviction, contended that in allegedly driving under the influence, Rosado acted with “implied malice.” That would have required the jury to find that Rosado knew what he was doing was dangerous to human life but did it anyway.
The prosecution pointed to warnings on Rosado’s driver’s license application about driving intoxicated, as well as an advisement in paperwork related to a plea bargain Rosado reached in a 2011 DUI case, court records show.
The defense countered that Rosado had driven hours without any issue, that there was no evidence that he was actually impaired and that the crash occurred after he apparently fell asleep at the wheel. Rosado and his niece were part of a tight-knit family, the defense argued, and he agreed to the “surprise” early-morning drive because he wanted to make sure she was safe.
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City News Service contributed to this report.