Mosque fire verdict
After jury convicts on all charges, he faces 40 years in prison
After a week of hearing evidence, a federal jury took less than three hours to find the man accused of burning down a Victoria mosque last year guilty of all charges.
VICTORIA — After a week of hearing evidence, a federal jury took less than three hours Monday to find Marq Vincent Perez, accused of burning down a Victoria mosque last year, guilty of all charges.
Perez, 26, was charged with arson, committing a hate crime and use of an unregistered destructive device in an unrelated crime.
He faces up to 40 years in prison when he is sentenced Oct. 2.
Embraces and tears followed the verdict, as some expressed relief and others sadness. Perez’s parents quickly left the courtroom.
“Justice has been served,” said Abe Ajrami, a Victoria Islamic Center leader and one of about 10 members in the courtroom.
“We wish that none of this had happened. We wish he did not do what he did, and that he’s not in jail, but you can’t reverse time. We’re praying for him to change his heart from hate to love,” he said.
Perez’s lawyer, Mark DiCarlo said he was “very disappointed in the verdict.”
“The jury was not able to hear most of the evidence. We wanted all the social media evidence, but the judge ruled that most of Marq Vincent Perez’s postings were not relevant,” he said.
Federal prosecutors declined to comment on the outcome.
The verdict by a jury of five men and seven women came just hours after both sides had delivered their closing remarks. The jury did not even break for lunch.
At the end of his closing earlier Monday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Sharad Khandelwal raised two large photos to show the panel.
One showed the gold-domed Victoria Islamic Center before it burned down on Jan. 28, 2017. The other showed it reduced to a dismal pile of ashes and charred metal.
“Think about how he turned this beautiful house of worship, where moms and dads and little kids went to pray together, into this,” he said, raising the second photo higher.
“Hold him accountable for what he did. Find him guilty,” Khandelwal said.
The burning of the mosque came during a heated national debate about immigration policy, the day after President Donald Trump moved to impose a travel ban on certain majority-Muslim countries.
Perez has been detained since his arrest on March 3, 2017, after police raided his house in Victoria, finding items stolen from the mosque and weapons used in an unrelated drive-by shooting.
Pattern of Islamophobia
At trial, the government presented a damning profile of a man who hated Muslims, feared they were a danger to Victoria and was willing to take radical action to stop them.
Perez denied any involvement with the mosque burning but presented no plausible alibi during trial.
The only moment of poignancy during the trial came last week when his father, Mario Perez, testified briefly.
Calling his son, “our beloved,” he said, “We love him unconditionally.”
The key witness against him was a then 16-year-old accomplice named K.R., who told of twice burglarizing the mosque with Perez. He also described how Perez set it afire during the second break-in.
K.R. has not been charged with any crimes and said he was cooperating in hope of leniency.
Other damning evidence included Perez’s own cell phone, which contained messages, photos, searches and posts that tied him to the crime, and his Facebook account, which the government obtained through a search warrant.
“Local response squad trained under me are now ready,” he wrote an acquaintance in mid-January, adding four days later, “If recon is run and weapons are found then it’s gonna be bad.”
Evidence ‘overwhelming’
Soon after the mosque started burning, Perez snapped what prosecutors described as “trophy photos” on his cell phone of the flames. They were recovered and shown to the jury.
“The evidence of the defendant’s guilt is simply overwhelming,” said Saeed Moody, a trial attorney for the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, during his closing argument.
“What do you call a man who burns down a Muslim church? You call him guilty,” he said in conclusion.
DiCarlo spoke next and tried to poke holes in the government’s case and its use of K.R. as a witness.
He also rebutted the claim that his client was a Muslim hater, suggesting instead that he simply had cultural differences with people from the Middle East.
“They would have you believe Marq Vincent Perez is a religious and political fanatic who wanted to destroy the Victoria Islamic Center. There was not a shred of hate literature in his house,” he said.
“If someone called someone else a redneck or a cracker, are they insulting Christians?” he asked rhetorically, trying to defuse his client’s use of vile insults about Muslims.
He also read several verses of scripture from the Quran to the jury.
DiCarlo focused much of his closing attacking K.R., the juvenile witness, calling him “a drug dealer, armament dealer, dope smoker and perjurer.”
“This is a well-oiled, cherrypicked case, with a star witness,” he said, referring to K.R.
Khandelwal, the last lawyer to speak, said Perez’s own words, both before and after the fire, helped the government’s case against him.
“He can’t keep his mouth shut or his fingers off the keyboard,” he told the jury.
“The day after (the fire) he wrote that ‘arsonists’ did it. This is a slip of the tongue, a window into his soul for all the world to see,” he said, noting that it was days before investigators reached that conclusion.
And, he said, even without its star witness, the government offered sufficient evidence to prove Perez’s guilt.
“You can put K.R.’s testimony completely aside and convict the defendant,” he said.