Benvenuto sentenced to life term

"Jorge, you deserve to die."

With those words, Ron Snarr summed up his family's feeling toward Jorge Benvenuto, the man who admitted killing Snarr's son and wounding his son's friend 17 months ago in a thrill killing.But Benvenuto will not die for the killings. He was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison - without the possibility of parole. He said nothing during his sentencing Friday morning in 3rd District Court, standing impassively for nearly an hour as friends and family of victims Zachary Snarr and Yvette Rodier Evans recounted how their lives have been torn apart.

Benvenuto, 20, pleaded guilty to capital murder in the Aug. 28, 1996, fatal shooting of Zach Snarr, 18, and guilty to attempted murder in the wounding of Rodier, now 19.

He admitted approaching them that night as they photographed the full moon rising above the waters of Little Dell Reservoir, talking to them to put them at ease, then shooting them.

Rodier, since married, said fear and pain rule her life now. She's afraid of the dark, afraid of the full moon, startled by gunshots on television and can't be left alone or go back into the mountains, she testified Friday.

She's had five operations on her head, and her body is heavily scarred from the three bullets Benvenuto fired into her with a .357-caliber handgun.

And, Rodier said, she has vivid memories of lying on the ground, wounded, waiting while Benvenuto reloaded the gun.

"There's nothing I've ever forgotten," she said, describing the sounds and even smells of gunsmoke from that night, the events replaying in her mind like a videotape.

"I knew when he stopped to reload that it was me he was trying to kill, and that's a horrible pain," Rodier said. She also feels guilty that she was unable to help Zach Snarr, whom investigators said died instantly of a head wound.

"I have survivor's guilt, I feel guilty because I lived and Zach didn't," Rodier said. "I feel guilty because I didn't hold his wounds, I didn't hold him tight.

"But I'm alive. I'm lucky, I will wake up tomorrow morning and Zach never will."

Rodier, unable to feel her legs or the blood streaming down her face from a head wound, crawled 265 feet up a rocky, brambled mountainside after the shooting to summon help, an act prosecutor Bob Stott said has made her his hero.