Alfredo Prieto

What the record shows

Alfredo Rolando Prieto was a Salvadoran-born man convicted of three murders: the December 1988 shooting deaths of Rachael Raver and Warren Fulton III, both 22, near Reston, Virginia, and the September 1990 killing of 15-year-old Yvette Woodruff in Ontario, California. He was sentenced to death in both states. After 14 years on California's death row he was extradited to Fairfax County, Virginia, where he was tried for the Reston killings, and he was executed by lethal injection at Greensville Correctional Center on October 1, 2015. DNA evidence linked him to further killings for which he was never tried, and the Wikipedia article puts the total number of victims at nine.

Prieto was born on November 18, 1965, in El Salvador, and according to the Wikipedia article his family moved to Pomona, California, in 1981. The article says he served a prison term for a 1984 shooting in Ontario in which the victims survived, and the California Supreme Court opinion in his case also refers to that shooting. After his release he lived for a time in Arlington, Virginia, before returning to California in 1990.

Raver, a 1988 George Washington University graduate and former Division I soccer player, and Fulton, a GW senior and baseball captain, were last seen on December 3, 1988, after leaving a bar in Washington, D.C., after midnight, The GW Hatchet reported. Their bodies were found on December 6 in a vacant lot off Hunter Mill Road near Reston. Both had been shot, and Raver had been raped. The case remained unsolved for 17 years.

On September 2, 1990, in Ontario, California, Prieto and several accomplices robbed and kidnapped a group that included a woman, her 17-year-old daughter and the daughter's 15-year-old friend, Yvette Woodruff, according to the California Supreme Court and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The three were raped; the mother and daughter were stabbed and survived, and Woodruff was shot in the head at close range. Prieto was arrested at his residence on September 6, 1990. A San Bernardino County jury convicted him of first-degree murder with special circumstances on January 21, 1992, and returned a death verdict that March. The California Supreme Court affirmed the death judgment on April 21, 2003.

After California began requiring DNA samples from convicted inmates, Prieto's profile entered the national database, and in 2005 DNA evidence from the Reston case was matched to him. A Fairfax County grand jury indicted him that year and he was extradited to Virginia on April 28, 2006. A jury convicted him of capital murder in June 2007, but the penalty phase ended in a mistrial. A 2008 retrial produced convictions and two death sentences, which the Supreme Court of Virginia set aside because of an unclear verdict form. A new sentencing jury recommended death on November 5, 2010, after rejecting his claim of intellectual disability, and Judge Randy Bellows imposed the sentences on December 16, 2010. The Supreme Court of Virginia affirmed them in January 2012.

DNA also linked Prieto to the 1988 rape and murder of Veronica Jefferson, 24, in Arlington. He was indicted in that case, but prosecutors later dismissed the charge, saying a further death sentence was not worth the expense, NBC Washington reported. He was also linked to the 1989 shooting death of Manuel Sermeno, 27, in Prince William County. The Wikipedia article further attributes to him the May 1990 killings of Stacey Siegrist and Anthony Gianuzzi in Rubidoux, California, and the June 1990 killings of Lula Mae and Herbert Farley; he was never prosecuted for any of these deaths.

Virginia scheduled his execution for October 1, 2015. His lawyers challenged the state's use of pentobarbital obtained from the Texas prison system after its supply of midazolam expired, and a federal judge briefly blocked the execution before the order was lifted, Reston Now reported. Gov. Terry McAuliffe declined to intervene and the U.S. Supreme Court refused a stay. Prieto, 49, was pronounced dead at 9:17 p.m. It was Virginia's first execution in three years.