SAN QUENTIN — Convicted killer Joseph A. Perez, Jr., who was on California’s death row from Contra Costa County, was found unresponsive Tuesday in his cell at San Quentin State Prison and later died, making him the second Bay Area killer to die on death row in barely more than a month, prison officials said.
Perez, 47, was found about 9:11 p.m. Tuesday. Emergency lifesaving measures were immediately started but Perez was pronounced dead at 9:21 p.m.
An autopsy will be conducted to determine his cause of death.
Officials said Perez was sentenced to death in Contra Costa County on Jan. 25, 2002, for the March 24, 1998, murder of Janet Daher, 46, who was strangled and stabbed in her Lafayette home during a home-invasion robbery. Perez had been on California’s death row since Jan. 25, 2002.
Perez was one of three people convicted in the murder but the only one to be sentenced to death.
According to previous media accounts, Perez, then 26, who was living in Millbrae at the time, Maury O’Brien, then 19 of Fairfield, and Lee Snyder, then 17, had originally wanted to rob a drug dealer that day, but changed their minds as they rode BART and got off in Lafayette to rob a house.
They chose Daher’s house on Rose Lane at random after finding the garage door open, and found the mother of two alone inside. She was beaten, stabbed and strangled before the trio escaped with jewelry and other items in the family’s SUV.
They were all arrested in June after Lafayette police received a tip.
Snyder was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole in 2000, but will now be eligible for parole after 25 years, thanks to a new state law regarding underage offenders. O’Brien, who testified against the other two and admitted to being a “coward” for not stopping the murder, was convicted in 2007 and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
In an interview Wednesday, O’Brien’s attorney, Dan Horowitz, called it a “meth-fueled” crime and said Perez was the most to blame out of the three.
“(Perez) was a sick, brutal man and brought nothing to this world, except horror,” Horowitz said.
Perez was the second condemned inmate at San Quentin to die in a two-day span, and the fourth to die since early November. Herminio Serra, who was convicted by a Santa Clara County jury of three murders in 1997, was found dead in his cell Monday evening. The cause of his death is still being investigated.
Southern California serial killer Andrew Urdiales, who was convicted of eight murders earlier this year, was found unresponsive late on Nov. 2, several weeks after he arrived on death row; his death was later ruled a suicide. Virendra Govin, convicted of killing four members of a family in 2002, took his life nearly two days later.
Since 1978, when California reinstated capital punishment, 79 condemned inmates have died from natural causes, 25 have committed suicide, 13 have been executed in California, one was executed in Missouri, one was executed in Virginia, 11 have died from other causes and four – including Perez – are pending a cause of death. There are currently 740 offenders on California’s death row.