A Silver Spring, Md., man was convicted Wednesday of second-degree murder after he stalked and located his ex-girlfriend using social media and fatally stabbed the new person she was seeing in a parking lot, prosecutors said.
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Denzel Kasaka, 23, faces decades in prison in the killing of Jose Augusto Ruiz, 20, prosecutors said.
“Denzel Kasaka is a threat to the safety of the community and the state intends to seek the maximum sentence of 40 years in prison,” Montgomery County State’s Attorney John McCarthy said in a statement announcing a jury found Kasaka guilty in what prosecutors called a “love triangle” murder.
On June 14, 2020, according to an indictment memo, Kasaka accessed his ex-girlfriend’s Instagram account to send threatening messages to Ruiz and the woman while the two spent the day together. Kasaka later tracked the pair in Ruiz’s townhouse parking lot where Ruiz and Kasaka engaged in a physical fight before Kasaka stabbed Ruiz to death, court records said.
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Defense attorneys Steve Chaikin and Jeffrey Zahler argued that Kasaka had legally defended himself after he and Ruiz had squared off in a fight.
“He was defending himself,” Chaikin said in an interview after the verdict. “In the worst case, he would have been found responsible for manslaughter.”
The messages and calls started about 10 a.m., according to court records.
The records said Kasaka was “acting jealous and was clearly upset that the two were spending the day together.”
“On everything it’s not gonna end well,” Kasaka said in a message, according to prosecutors.
As the day went on, Ruiz and Kasaka’s ex-girlfriend went to her home to “get some clothes to spend the night with Ruiz,” the indictment memo said, and she saw Kasaka’s car pulling out of her neighborhood. She then texted Kasaka that she was home, as she believed he was in search of her, according to the memo.
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She and Ruiz then instead went to Ruiz’s grandmother’s home “to drink and hang out,” and Kasaka continued to send them “threatening messages,” the memo said.
About 10 p.m., Ruiz and the woman returned to her home following a “disagreement regarding Kasaka and all the threatening messages he was sending,” according to court documents.
The pair then decided to spend the night at Ruiz’s townhouse in the 13700 block of Avonshire Drive in Silver Spring and remained in the parked vehicle when they arrived, according to the memo.
While in the parking lot, the woman spotted Kasaka’s car again, court documents said.
Kasaka parked and approached the pair before the men began “hitting and punching each other while [the woman] was screaming and attempting to keep them apart,” court documents said. Neighbors heard the fight, and one captured a video of the incident. During the altercation, Ruiz “broke the back window of Kasaka’s vehicle,” the memo said.
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After that, Kasaka returned to his vehicle and came back with a knife, stabbing Ruiz “twice in the abdomen area” with one wound “directly to the heart,” according to the memo.
After police were called, Ruiz was taken to a hospital, where he died.
That night, Kasaka’s car was located with a broken back window on Good Hope Road near his home in Silver Spring, and two days later, Kasaka turned himself in to police, the memo said.
The jury deliberated over three days — two hours on Monday evening, seven hours on Tuesday and two hours on Wednesday, according to Chaikin. They acquitted Kasaka on the top charge, first-degree, premeditated murder, which is punishable by up to life in prison. They found him guilty of second-degree murder, meaning the act was willful and intentional but not premeditated.
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In Maryland, second-degree murder is punishable by up to 40 years in prison.
While prosecutors said Wednesday they will seek the full 40 years at Kasaka’s sentencing hearing in February, Chaikin said he will seek a far shorter term.
Chaikin said he will also appeal the second-degree murder conviction. He and Zahler had argued two forms of self-defense to the jury: Complete self-defense, which had the jury agreed would have yielded acquittal, and imperfect self-defense. The imperfect self-defense argument held that Kasaka thought his life was in danger even if someone else might not come to that conclusion.
Chaikin described the altercation in the parking lot as chaotic.
“My client was pushed, chased and thrown to the ground, and he had the window of his car smashed,” Chaikin said. “Both of these young men were not happy.”