A man who was on the run for two months after a Kansas City, Kansas, bar shooting that left four people dead and five injured has been convicted of eight felonies.
A judge found Hugo Villanueva-Morales, 35, guilty Wednesday of capital murder, attempted first-degree murder, aggravated assault, four counts of aggravated battery and criminal possession of a firearm.
He faces a sentence of life without parole when he is sentenced on July 1.
His attorney, Mark Manna, said prosecutors withdrew their notice to seek death in return for him waiving his right to a jury trial. More than two dozen witnesses appeared at the bench trial.
Villanueva-Morales and another man, Javier Alatorre, entered the Tequila KC bar and opened fire on Oct. 6, 2019. Police have said the shooting apparently stemmed from an earlier dispute inside the bar, prompting the two men to return to the bar with handguns and start shooting.
Alatorre was arrested a short time later, but Villanueva-Morales fled to Mexico, where he wasn’t captured until two months after the shooting. Alatorre is now serving a 34-year sentence after pleading guilty to four counts of second-degree murder.
Both suspects had previous brushes with the law. At the time of the shooting, Villanueva-Morales was facing a pending third-degree assault charge in Missouri. Court documents say he fought with a sheriff’s deputy in August 2019 after another man was ordered to leave a club in Kansas City, Missouri.
Villanueva-Morales also had been caught with synthetic marijuana while serving more than four years in a state prison for robbery. The judge could have sent him back to prison for nine years but instead put him on probation, which he violated by testing positive for marijuana. He left jail a week before the bar shooting, according to a review of court records by AP.
Alatorre, meanwhile, faced several charges stemming from a police chase at the time of the shooting.