Man sentenced to life for murdering his child's mother outside Hawthorne police station
LOS ANGELES - An ex-con who was found guilty of murdering the mother of his child during a custody exchange outside the Hawthorne police station was sentenced Monday to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Jacob Ryan Munn, 36, of Hawthorne was also given 29-years-to- life in prison.
Munn was convicted Oct. 29 of first-degree murder and possession of a firearm by a felon, with jurors also finding true the special circumstance allegation of murder while lying in wait.
Authorities said Munn left the child, who was then about 1 1/2 years old, inside the police station and then shot and killed his 28-year-old ex-girlfriend, Brenda Renteria, as she approached the door on April 7, 2019.
"One of our officers was inside and rushed outside when he heard the gunfire," then-Lt. Gary Tomatani told City News Service shortly after the shooting. "Witnesses told the officer that the man who shot the woman was fleeing the scene. That's when an officer-involved shooting took place."
The suspect was not hit by the gunfire, and police subsequently tracked his car to the area of 133rd Street and Hawthorne Boulevard outside a Denny's restaurant, Tomatani said.
Officers -- assisted by SWAT and K-9 teams and colleagues from the Torrance, Manhattan Beach and Santa Monica police departments -- then set up a perimeter and brought in police dogs to look for Munn, who was arrested nearly three hours later in the 4400 block of 134th Street.
The child involved in the custody exchange was not injured.
The victim's mother, Sandra Tanory, who was with Renteria and her sister that day, said it was the "worst day of my life" to see her daughter gunned down with a shotgun. She said she "saw the unimaginable" and was forced to watch her daughter collapse, leaving her family devastated and her daughter's three children motherless.
She said that the sound of the gunfire still echoes in her mind, and that she is still haunted by being unable to protect her daughter that day.
"I will never understand how somebody can do something so evil ... an evil person who will never take accountability," she said.
The victim's daughter said she and her daughters have to go through the rest of their lives without their mother.
"This is no man. This is a monster," she said of the defendant.
The judge told the victim's family members that his sympathy is with them, while noting that there was nothing he could do to erase their pain.
He noted that a parent's worst fear is that they will outlive their children, saying that the idea that a child's life will be cut short is awful.