Third Death-Penalty Trial Begins 13 Years After Slaying : Crime: The state Supreme Court has twice reversed Jose Leon Fuentes’ sentence for shooting a Brinks guard at the Del Amo Fashion Center.

The once-thriving store where the bullets flew now stands vacant and boarded up. The 6-year-old son of the murder victim has grown to manhood. But prosecutors are still trying to send the defendant, now balding and bespectacled, to the gas chamber.

Opening statements in the third death-penalty trial of Jose Leon Fuentes, 51, took place this week in Los Angeles Superior Court as aging witnesses arrived from all over the country to tell again what they remember about Dec. 1, 1980.

On that Monday afternoon, terrified Christmas shoppers at Ohrbach’s, in the Del Amo Fashion Center, dived for cover as Brinks security guard Paul Martinez, 36, exchanged gunfire with a robber intent on taking over $85,000 in cash and checks from him.

Martinez, who was struck three times, died when one of the bullets pierced his heart. Fuentes, one of two robbers seen by witnesses that day, was struck five times but survived his wounds. His apparently uninjured accomplice, who fled empty-handed, was never identified and never found.

Two previous juries concluded that the robber who attacked Martinez was Fuentes and recommended that he be put to death for the crime.

Twice, however, the state Supreme Court has reversed Fuentes’ death sentence while upholding his murder conviction.

Four years after his first trial in 1981, the high court--then under Chief Justice Rose Bird--overturned his death sentence on grounds that the jury was not told it must find that he intended to kill Martinez.

After Fuentes was retried in 1987 and sentenced to death once more, the high court under Chief Justice Malcolm Lucas again overturned the death penalty, this time on grounds that blacks were improperly excluded from the new jury.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Lael Rubin hopes the third try to send Fuentes to the gas chamber will be the last.

“There’s certainly not going to be any error in jury selection if I can help it, and the instructional error (to the first jury) doesn’t exist anymore, so I would hope this is the last time we have to do this,” she said.

Defense attorney Michael Clark declined comment about the case. He told the court he will make an opening statement to the jury next week. In previous trials, attorneys for Fuentes have tried to prove that the unidentified robber--not Fuentes--was the one who fired the shots that killed Martinez.

Investigators at the scene in 1980 found a second gun tossed into an Ohrbach’s merchandise display, but technical analysis proved that no bullets had been fired from it, Rubin said.