Jurors convicted Marcus Anthony Eriz of shooting and killing Aiden Leos in a road rage incident. (Mug shot: the Orange County, Calif. District Attorney’s Office; image of Leos: screenshot from KABC-TV)
Jurors in Orange County, California, convicted a man on Thursday of shooting and killing a 6-year-old in another vehicle during a road rage incident. Marcus Anthony Eriz, 26, opened fire on Aiden Leos on May 21, 2021.
Prosecutors said that the child’s mother was driving him to kindergarten at Calvary Chapel in the city of Yorba Linda when Wynne Lee, 26, allegedly cut her off while driving a Volkswagen SportWagen with Eriz in the passenger seat.
The mother flipped Lee off and kept driving, but she heard a loud noise and her son saying “Ow.”
She pulled over the side of the freeway, took Aiden out of his car seat and called 911, prosecutors said. Aiden died at the hospital.
The shooting sparked a manhunt that ended in the California Highway Patrol arresting the defendants on June 6, 2021. The case against Lee is ongoing for a felony count of accessory after the fact and a misdemeanor count of having a concealed firearm in a vehicle.
As for Eriz, he is now guilty of second-degree murder, shooting into an occupied vehicle, and two felony enhancements of the personal discharge of a firearm causing great bodily injury and death. He faces a maximum sentence of 40 years to life in prison in a hearing scheduled for April 12.
“The heartbreak of a parent losing a child is so overwhelming that no word exists to describe it,” said Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer. “The short, happy life of Aiden Leos is a life interrupted, abruptly ended by a bullet that pierced Aiden’s heart. The bullet not only killed a little 6-year-old boy; it ripped a hole in the heart of all of Orange County. Six-year-old boys should be playing outside in the sunshine, soaking in all the magic and wonder that is boyhood, not lying dead in a tiny, child-size coffin because a man he never met decided to execute him for no conceivable reason. While we will never know what Aiden would have become, we know that the pursuit of justice did not end until his killer was captured and this child murderer was prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
