One of three men convicted in a deadly stabbing attack on a woman in a Century City parking garage was sentenced on April 23 to life in prison without possibility of parole.
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Kathleen Kennedy told Steven Vicente Simmons, “You truly deserve the sentence that I’m about to impose.”
“How can you commit such a horrible, horrible crime?” the judge asked the 26-year-old defendant, noting that the pain Pamela Fayed experienced as she was stabbed to death July 28, 2008, “had to be excruciating.”
The judge noted that she has seen the surveillance video “so many times” of Fayed coming out of a building, and that she wants to warn the woman to stop and go back into the building each time she sees it.
Simmons was convicted Feb. 20 along with co-defendants Gabriel Jay Marquez, 50, and Jose Luis Moya, 54, of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder in a crime masterminded by the woman’s estranged husband. Marquez and Moya also are facing life in prison without possibility of parole, with sentencing set for June 25.
Jurors also found true the special circumstance allegation of murder while lying in wait against the three defendants, along with the special circumstance allegation of murder for financial gain against Moya, who had worked as a ranch hand for the woman’s estranged husband, James Fayed, at his Ventura County ranch.
James Fayed — who was tried separately — was convicted in May 2011 of murder and conspiracy for masterminding the attack on the 44-year-old woman, who was stabbed 13 times as she approached her SUV in a parking garage at Watt Tower.
He was sentenced to death in November 2011 by Kennedy, who noted that Fayed was nearby as his wife was being “brutally and brazenly” murdered, and that others reacted to the victim’s “blood-curdling screams.”
The Fayeds were amid a bitter divorce, and the killing occurred just after the two met with their criminal attorneys as a result of a federal investigation into the couple’s gold-trading business.
At the sentencing hearing, Pamela Fayed’s oldest daughter, Desiree Goudie, said, “You three are monsters.” She said her mother was “savagely attacked” from behind.
