Jury Urges Death Sentence for Killer of Pomona Police Officer

A jury Friday recommended the death sentence for the killer of a Pomona policeman in the city’s first case of a peace officer slain in the line of duty.

The Pomona Superior Court jury deliberated two hours and 15 minutes before deciding that Ronald Bruce Mendoza, 23, should die for the first-degree murder of Officer Daniel Fraembs.

A throng of Pomona police officers that filled the courtroom and spilled out to the hallway erupted in loud cheers, stood, then applauded after the sentence was read.

Fraembs, 37, was shot in the face after stopping Mendoza, a gang member, and two friends walking with him on a Pomona street May 11, 1996.

Prosecutors said Mendoza, on parole for burglary and beating up a school police officer, shot Fraembs because he feared being sent back to prison.

The jury Wednesday found Mendoza guilty of first-degree murder, with three special circumstances that made the death penalty possible.

After his conviction, Mendoza shaved his head in what police said was an act of defiance.

In the courtroom Friday, Mendoza, a slight young man dressed in a pale blue striped shirt and black trousers with no belt, stared straight ahead, expressionless as the death sentence was recommended.

When someone in the courtroom shouted, “Another day in the ‘hood!” mocking a declaration Mendoza is said to have made after the shooting, the defendant smiled and replied, “That’s all it is.”

As Mendoza was escorted from court, officers in the audience taunted him by calling out “See ya, Ronnie,” and one shouted, “Dead man walking!”

Mendoza’s cousin, Teresa Chavez, 22, said officers sitting behind her in the courtroom taunted her by joking about lethal injections.

“I don’t think they have to take somebody else’s life away,” she said, and pointed out that Mendoza is the father of an 18-month-old girl.

Officer Mike Ezell, who wore Fraembs’ police identification card around his neck, said the death penalty is “absolutely what [the slain man] would have wanted.”

Fraembs was born in Hong Kong but was abandoned on a beach before he was a year old. A police officer found him, and he was adopted and raised by an Ohio family.

Fraembs, who was single, joined the Pomona Police Department in 1993, after working as jailer for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department and serving in the Marine Corps.

Officer Douglas Wagaman, a close friend who practiced martial arts with Fraembs four days a week, said Fraembs confided to him that he felt he was in between two cultures--a bit apart from white America, yet unfamiliar with Asia.

Before he was killed, Fraembs had begun to study Chinese and was planning a trip to Hong Kong.

“We’re celebrating that hoodlum getting a little of what he deserves, but at the same time dealing with the fact that it doesn’t bring Daniel back,” Wagaman said.