PASADENA, Calif. -- A man was sentenced to five years' probation Friday for shooting his father, a Filipino-American newspaper executive, and trying to disguise the slaying as a political assassination.
Superior Court Judge Gilbert Alston also ordered Arnel Salvatierra, 20, to continue psychiatric counseling.
Salvatierra spent more than three years in custody following his arrest for the February 1986 shooting death of Oscar Salvatierra, 41, the marketing director for the San Francisco-based Philippine News.
But he has been free on his own recognizance since jurors acquitted him in December of first-degree murder and convicted him of the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter.
Alston imposed no further time in custody for Salvatierra, who could have been sentenced to state prison for up to 11 years.
Oscar Salvatierra was shot three times in the head as he slept in their Glendale home Feb. 19, 1986.
Arnel Salvatierra admitted killing his father but said he did it out of fear because he had been a frequent victim of his father's beatings.
He testified the week before the slayings, his father 'threatened me several times that he was going to shoot me, kill me, blow my head off.'
'I didn't have a lot of choices. It was either him or me, and I chose me.'
But Deputy District Attorney Susan Wondries suggested the real reason was the son's anger over his father's efforts to stop him from seeing his girlfriend, and fear that his father was about to find out that he had made unauthorized purchases with family credit cards.
Investigators said the younger Salvatierra tried to disguise the slaying as a political assassination by sending his father anonymous letters stating he had been sentenced to death for his newspaper's opposition to Ferdinand Marcos, who was about to be ousted as president of the Philippines.
Trial is pending against the former girlfriend, Teressa Kay DeBurger, 20, on a charge of being an accessory to the slaying. She is accused of returning the handgun used in the slaying to the home of a friend, and of laundering Arnel Salvatierra's clothes to remove traces of gunpowder.
