Man convicted of murdering SLO County man found guilty in other stabbing
A man who was previously convicted of fatally stabbing someone 10 times was found guilty Thursday of another stabbing months earlier.
On Sept. 9, Santa Maria resident Angel Eduardo Ramos-Ramirez, 31, was found guilty by a jury of the second-degree murder of 20-year-old Daniel Diaz in Oceano in 2022, according to court records. Ramos-Ramirez was found to have murdered Diaz using a deadly weapon — in this case, a knife — in association with a street gang.
The gang, West Park, operates primarily in Santa Maria, the District Attorney’s Office said in a news release Monday.
Ramos-Ramirez was also suspected of stabbing Abel Cortez-Moreno — a teenager at the time — non-fatally at a quinceañera nine months prior to Diaz’s murder, but those charges were severed and dealt with in a separate trial that culminated in a guilty verdict Thursday.
Though charged under the same complaint, the crimes were tried separately in an effort to protect Ramos-Ramirez’s due process rights by preventing the jury for the murder charge from hearing evidence on the stabbing charge, which could have swayed their verdict. The murder charge was tried first.
After the murder trial, Ramos-Ramirez waved his right to a jury for the stabbing charges, resulting in a court trial in which evidence was presented to and decided on solely by the judge.
During the court trial, Ramos-Ramirez’s lawyer, Laura Petty, argued he stabbed Cortez-Moreno in self-defense.
At the quinceañera on Sept. 4, 2021, two young women told Ramos-Ramirez that Cortez-Moreno had been “molesting” them on the dance floor, Petty said.
When Ramos-Ramirez publicly confronted Cortez-Moreno and asked him to leave the party, Cortez-Moreno’s “brothers and cousins came forward with bottles of beer in their hand that appeared to be held as weapons” and surrounded Ramos-Ramirez, Petty said.
Believing he was about to be attacked, Ramos-Ramirez took out his knife and stabbed Cortez-Moreno once in the chest, Petty said.
San Luis Obispo County Superior Court Judge Jesse Marino ultimately found Ramos-Ramirez to be guilty of felony assault with a deadly weapon — again, a knife — with an enhancement for inflicting great bodily injury.
“I don’t find any credible evidence that those beer bottles were broken or otherwise wielded in a way that was reasonably threatening to the extent that a reasonable person would find the need to use deadly force here,” Marino said. “ ... I can think of many ways that these circumstances might have played out in his head, and he may have perceived that he was indeed in danger for his life, but I can’t find that a reasonable person in his circumstances would have believed the same.”
Ramos-Ramirez also had a prior conviction in Santa Barbara County in 2016 for making criminal threats for the benefit of the West Park gang, which qualifies as a strike under California’s Three Strikes Law, the release said.
Ramos-Ramirez faces a maximum sentence of 41 years to life in state prison, according to the release. He will be sentenced for both crimes on April 28.
“We will aggressively prosecute violent crime in our community,” District Attorney Dan Dow said in the release. “Particularly violent gang crime, which far too often targets our disadvantaged population. We remain committed to working closely with our local and regional law enforcement partners to guarantee successful prosecutions and appropriate sentences in cases of gang violence.”
This story was originally published February 3, 2026 at 5:00 AM.
