Rodriguez Barriga

Eduardo Rodriguez Barriga was found guilty Wednesday after shooting another man last August in a dispute over a woman.

The eleven jurors found Rodriguez, 26, guilty of second-degree assault and two counts of unlawful use of a weapon. His sentencing will take place Monday, May 8.

One juror fell ill before the trial concluded, but the decision was unanimous and the court accepted the verdict.

Rodriguez was arrested in Umatilla shortly after the shooting, which occurred August 24. He got into a dispute with Daniel Lemus Carranza, 25, over a woman that Rodriguez had been dating. Rodriguez fired a gun and the bullet hit Lemus in the leg. After the shooting, Rodriguez drove off and Lemus tried to follow him in his own vehicle while calling 9-1-1. Dispatch told him to stop following the vehicle, and he parked at a convenience store where police and medics met up with him.

Lemus was treated for a superficial gunshot wound to his leg.

At Wednesday’s hearing, Rodriguez tried to convince jurors that he had acted in self-defense.

Rodriguez said that the morning of the incident he had met with the woman when she got a call from an unknown number. The call was from Lemus, whom Rodriguez told to stop calling and the two got in a verbal altercation.

Later that day Rodriguez said he saw Lemus in another car at an intersection and felt he was taunting him. He followed Lemus to Funland at Butte Park, where the two parked next to each other.

Rodriguez said he thought Lemus had a gun and was rolling the window of his vehicle down.

“I panicked, and thought he’d shoot, so I ducked,” Rodriguez said. He had a handgun on the floor of his vehicle. “So I loaded my gun and I shot a round. I didn’t see where I shot.”

It was later discovered that Lemus did not have a gun in his possession at the time of the incident.

Rodriguez said he left the scene and went to his home in Umatilla, where he put the gun in a crawlspace in his house.

“I was in panic mode, I was shocked,” he said. “I saw the hole, and shoved the gun into the hole (under the house).”

Hermiston and Umatilla police officers later obtained a search warrant and retrieved the handgun from Rodriguez’s home. They also recovered a stolen shotgun from a Umatilla County Sheriff’s Office case.

Rodriguez said he and Lemus have a history of conflict. He said the two had a falling out and have not spoken for several years, but that a few years ago, the two got into a dispute over another woman. Rodriguez said Lemus showed up at his house and assaulted him, hitting him over the head with a bottle.

“He split my head,” Rodriguez said.

But prosecutor Jaclyn Jenkins said Rodriguez had failed to bring up that incident during his initial interview with a police detective.

“Relationships are hard,” she said. “This case is not. What happened is simple. The defendant wanted to get back with his girlfriend. She was talking to another guy. So he shot that guy. It’s that simple. There was no self-defense. He decided to solve that personal issue with gunfire.”

Defense attorney Thomas Gray told jurors that Lemus had demonstrated aggressiveness, both by seeking out a confrontation with Rodriguez and by following him after he was shot.

“If you look at the totality, Mr. Lemus was instrumental in what happened here,” he said.

Jenkins said Rodriguez’s actions were not the result of a split-second decision to defend himself.

“This was a series of bad decisions made by the defendant,” she said. “You don’t pull the handgun off the floor of the car if you’re just going to meet someone. He knows the individual didn’t carry guns. He testified that they’d had problems before, but didn’t tell (the detective). This is a series of decisions. It wasn’t a surprise. The defendant did exactly what he set out to do.”

Rodriguez admitted that he had made a mistake, and that he shouldn’t have followed Lemus to the park.

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Contact Jayati Ramakrishnan at 541-564-4534 or jramakrishnan@eastoregonian.com.