COOK COUNTY CRIMINAL COURTHOUSE — A gangbanger partially paralyzed by gunshots will almost certainly spend the rest of his life in prison for the murder of Manny Roman after a judge called him "evil" despite initially feeling sorry for him because he's in a wheelchair.
Andrew Ruiz, 33, did not appear shaken Thursday in court when a Cook County judge sentenced him to 99 years behind bars for the 2009 murder of the Logan Square barber.
"Evil sits in this courtroom," Judge Joseph Hennelly said in handing down the sentence.
Roman, 23, was out shortly after midnight on Halloween when Ruiz pulled up alongside the car he was in and, without provocation, started shooting, prosecutors said. He hit Roman, who later died, and seriously wounded a second man.
"It was Halloween and somebody was going to die," Ruiz told others in his car, prosecutors said at his trial in March.
A paraplegic, Ruiz was using sticks to control the gas and brake pedals of his car when he killed Roman.
"This is the kind [of case] the people in the Legislature where thinking of when they made the death penalty," Assistant State's Attorney Daniel Reedy said Thursday. The case "shakes your belief in humanity ... in God."
The bravery of the witnesses who took the stand to testify against Ruiz and the tenacity of Manny Roman's family "give us faith again," he said.
Having waited to speak her piece for more than four years, Roman's mother, Myrna, eagerly took the stand to ask the judge for justice in the form of a long sentence.
Roman talked about her son, murdered in cold blood for no reason in spite of all the good choices he made, and how cheated his children are to grow up without a father.
She said she's afraid to let his twin boys and a 4-year-old daughter born shortly after Manny Roman was killed play outside "not because of imaginary monsters but the real ones who shoot to kill," she said.
Normally a strong woman, Roman said the murder of her son left her shattered "in a million pieces." She struggled to hold it together for the last four years as the case against Ruiz moved slowly through the criminal justice system.
Roman recalled when Ruiz rolled toward her in the courtroom during the trial "staring and making that gang sign," she said. "As if I did this to him."
Preston Jones, a public defender representing Ruiz, cast his client as the product of a home torn apart by addiction.
He argued that Ruiz — removed from the home of his drug-addicted parents as a child, forced to join a gang at age 11 and sexually assaulted by a friend of his father — should be treated mercifully.
Hennelly said when he first saw Ruiz in court, he felt sorry for him.
"I could not help but feel pity for you," he said. "I didn't know how you could have committed the crime."
But after hearing the state's case against Ruiz and seeing his behavior in court, the judge concluded that Ruiz' physical disability did not limit his capacity for criminal acts, he said in handing down the sentence.
"That wheelchair is not a handicap to you at all," he said. "You can accomplish crime and death and brutality."
A self-admitted gang member paralyzed by gunfire in 2001, Ruiz maintained his innocence throughout the court proceedings.
"I am sorry for [Manny Roman's] family, but I didn't do that shooting," he said Thursday.
Accused in the unrelated murder of a man on the Eisenhower Expressway in 2010, Ruiz may soon be back in court.
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