Jury delivers sentence for man who killed Army vet at bus stop

(San Antonio, TX) The family of an Army Infantry veteran, who was killed during an attempted robbery at a bus stop in 2015 in finally getting some closure.

Jesse Richards, 26, was shot in the chest by Daniel Jeremy Torres when he got off a bus got after working at a Texas Road House in San Antonio.  According to the police the Iraq war veteran was waiting at a bus stop at roughly 10 p.m., on Dec. 20, when he was approached by Torres and his younger brother, David Zuniga.

“He had a box of food in his hand and he was headed home. That’s what makes this all the more disturbing that someone could just be sitting there waiting for the bus, and have somebody approach and shoot them,” said Jesse Salame with the San Antonio Police Department.

During the trial of David Zuniga, 18, his brother, Juan Torrez, 19, testified that their brother Daniel Torres, 21, was the person who fired the shot that killed Richards.

Both men are criminally responsible for the murder, according to the law of parties, prosecutors said.

Zuniga was given a life sentence for his participation in the attempted robbery and murder. On Wednesday, a jury delivered a 65-year prison sentence to Jeremy Torres after almost four hours of deliberation, according to MySanAntonio.

“There are bad men, evil men who hurt people, and Daniel Torres is one of those men,” Somers said as he pointed to Torres while trying to convince the jury to hand a life sentence. “This man murdered someone who would have died to protect him.”

He continued to tell the jurors that they had “an opportunity to protect us.”

MySanAntonio reports:

“As he described the grandson he raised, Gary Richards, 76, choked up on the witness stand. He said Jesse Richards suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder after serving three tours of duty in Iraq, lived in a halfway house in San Antonio and was trying to turn his life around when he was killed.
He told the jury he and his wife took Richards in when he was about 2 because his mother couldn’t handle him. As pictures were shown of Richards as a child named Jesse Hickman, through his teen years and in the Army, Gary Richards cried when he recalled that his grandson, as an adult, changed his name to Jesse Richards to honor the only father he ever knew.”

When handed down his sentence by Judge Laura Parker, Torres had no reaction or sign of remorse. Torres was fined $10,000 will be eligible for parole in 3o years.

In Aug. 2005, Richards joined the United States Army.  After basic training, Richards was stationed at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii. While stationed there, he was deployed to Iraq for more than a year. After returning to Hawaii, Richards transferred to Fort Riley Kansas. While there, he was deployed to Iraq two more times for a total of three and half years. He was discharged from the Army in Sept. of 2012.

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