Hunt for San Juan Capistrano Murder Suspect Ended in San Clemente

As Orange County sheriff’s deputies were hunting a man accused of killing his neighbor in a San Juan Capistrano mobile home park, Robert Eugene Vasquez fled to San Clemente in search of friends, jurors learned Monday.

It ultimately was a San Clemente friend who turned him in.

Vasquez, charged with murder with a special circumstance for lying in wait and nearly killing another man, grew up in San Clemente, graduating from San Clemente High School.

In the predawn hours on Dec. 1, 2011, authorities believe he hid in the bushes of his next-door neighbor at the San Juan Mobile Estates, waited for Bobby Ray Rainwater Jr. to emerge, then jumped him from behind, punching him, stabbing him in the back a dozen or so times, then slit his throat.

Senior Deputy District Attorney Ebrahim Baytieh has said that Vasquez was stirred into a frenzy by his mother’s rumors that Rainwater was a child molester. (Rainwater was a registered sex offender but not for any crime against a child.) In Vasquez’s own words in a videotaped confession, he needed to protect the neighborhood from a “creeper.”

In courtroom testimony Monday, Vasquez’s father of the same name testified he saw his son that morning. He looked upset.

“I told him it was going to be morning and to go back to bed,” Vasquez’s father said.

But Vasquez didn’t go back to bed, according to trial testimony. He ran.

At some point, he dropped the murder weapon – what Vasquez described in a videotaped confession to deputies as a Buck knife – in Trabuco Creek.

Lance Lyons, the victim of the second attack, told Patch that Vasquez showed up at his house Dec. 2, 2011 in the evening, spent the night, then allegedly took a metal mallet to his face the next morning as Lyons slept. Lyons’s brother was able to stop a potentially second fatal blow, and Vasquez was reportedly in the wind again.

According to a witness who testified last week, Vasquez showed up at her home in the same mobile home park Dec. 3, 2011.

“He said he needed a place to hide,” said Machelle Sarkisian. “He wanted to come into my house … he was too wired to be out in the environment.”

Speaking from her porch, Sarkisian went inside to grab herself a cigarette, and when she came out, Vasquez was gone, she told the jury.

At about 6 p.m., Vasquez showed up at San Clemente home of Mary Jane Schmidt, whose son was best friends with Vasquez since kindergarten, she told the jury.

“He looked like he was scared or that he needed help. I believe he was agitated. I was asking questions, but he wasn’t answering,” Schmidt said.

Schmidt had company over that day. Vasquez was there about 15-20 minutes, she said. Then he just left.

About an hour later, Vasquez arrived at the San Clemente house of Christopher Josefovsky, a friend since their teen years, Josefovsky told the jury.

“It looked like he hadn’t slept or hadn’t been at home for a while,” Josefovsky said of Vasquez. “He was crying.”

Josefovsky gave him $5 to go get something at a nearby liquor store. Then he called 9-1-1.

“I was under the impression that he had hurt somebody and he was being hunted by police,” Josefovsky said. He told the dispatcher: “Robert Vasquez is here. I heard you might be looking for him.”

When Vasquez returned from the store, deputies made the arrest.

EDITOR'S NOTE: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated what time Vasquez showed up to Machelle Sarkisian's house. It was on Dec. 3, 2011, after the attack on Lance Lyons.