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VERNAL — David Urrutia was a reliable employee who never missed a day of work in the few months he held his job with a pipeline construction crew.
So when Urrutia didn't show up one day in early January 2013, it was cause for concern, Brad Allred testified Wednesday. Allred, who supervised Urrutia, said coworkers tried for several days to find the man he described as "easy to get along with."
"Three or four days later, (deputies) found him," Allred said.
Prosecutors say Urrutia, 38, was beaten to death inside the tiny camp trailer he shared near Fort Duchesne with his cousin, Jose Eduardo Leiva-Perez. They have charged Leiva-Perez with murder, a first-degree felony. A jury trial in the case is set to run through Friday.
Sandra Urrutia testified Wednesday that she got a phone call from Leiva-Perez on Jan. 6. He told her that her brother had been attacked inside the trailer by three "darker men and a Native American" and was in the hospital.
After the initial call, Urrutia testified that Leiva-Perez would not answer her calls. She eventually called her sister, Consuelo Urrutia, who lives in Weber County, asking her to drive to Uintah County to check on their brother. Consuelo Urrutia made the drive on Jan. 7, but when she couldn't get inside her brother's trailer or make contact with him, she called the sheriff's office to request a welfare check.
Deputy Clay Caldwell handled the call and said Wednesday that he could see blood inside the trailer when he looked in the windows. He forced his way inside and found Urrutia dead on the floor.
Photographs taken by a Utah State Crime Lab team showed blood on the walls inside the trailer and on a tan comforter. Assistant Vernal Police Chief Keith Campbell, testifying in his capacity as a deputy medical examiner, also noted that there was a large pool of frozen blood under Urrutia's body.
"The decedent was actually frozen to the floor," Campbell said.
Despite all the blood, investigators said there were no signs of a violent struggle like the one Leiva-Perez described to Sandra Urrutia and later to sheriff's detectives before admitting that he killed David Urrutia with a steel bar, allegedly in self-defense.
Uintah County sheriff's detective Stephanie Cox testified Wednesday that she helped recover a steel bar from the trailer one month after Urrutia's body was found. An evidence technician testified that she noticed the bar during the initial processing of the crime scene but did not collect it because it did not appear to have any blood on it.
Defense attorney Bryan Sidwell, who asked very few questions during his cross-examination of the state's witnesses, told the jury during his opening statement that his client only admitted to killing Urrutia because he was promised by police that "things would go better if he confessed."
"His statement to the police is not trustworthy," Sidwell said, offering the alternate theory that Urrutia may have been killed by three men in a dispute over a woman he had been seeing.
Sidwell told jurors that Leiva-Perez had been Tasered more than once during his Jan. 17 arrest by deputy U.S. marshals in California. He was also being treated in the jail's infirmary for an infected leg injury when he was interrogated, and was relying on assumptions about the police that were based on his experience with law enforcement in his native Guatemala.
In a 32-page ruling handed down in March, Judge Clark McClellan held that police properly advised Leiva-Perez of his Miranda rights and that his decision to waive those rights was "knowing and voluntary," as required by law. The judge also rejected defense claims that officers subjected Leiva-Perez to duress during questioning.
Leiva-Perez has been deported from the United States at least once before and was in the country illegally when Urrutia was killed, according to court records.
