Sylmar man sentenced to 89 years to life for killing innocent bystander in Long Beach

Exactly four years after a 24-year-old woman was shot and killed as an innocent bystander in a crowded downtown Long Beach parking lot, her family and friends addressed her killer in court.

They remembered Anna Perez as a bubbly young woman with a lively sense of humor. They admonished Thomas Terrell McCreary of Sylmar for bringing a gun with him to celebrate a relative’s birthday and destroying their family.

“If you needed to bring a loaded gun with you, you shouldn’t have gone out that night,” Perez’ friend, Sylvia Plata, said during victim impact statements in Long Beach Superior Court.

Judge James D. Otto sentenced 46-year-old McCreary, to 89 years to life in prison. A jury found him guilty in August of first-degree murder and being a felon in possession of a firearm.

McCreary, who had been convicted of multiple counts of burglary in 2006, was on parole and had been out of prison for nearly 14 months at the time of the shooting.

Perez was standing with two friends more than 40 feet away from a confrontation between two groups of people when McCreary grabbed a firearm from his car and fired two to five shots at a woman who had slammed a skateboard on the back of his Chevy Impala in the early morning hours, Dec. 1, 2018.

McCreary missed his intended target, but one of the bullets hit Perez. She and her two friends had returned to the parking lot after hanging out at a nearby bar. Perez did not initially want to go out that night, but was persuaded by friends, attorneys said during the trial.

Family members described Perez as the life of the party. They said their lives have been destroyed since her death. All five speakers asked McCreary why he grabbed the gun and fired it that night.

McCreary kept his head forward and did not face any of the speakers. He declined to speak, but his attorney, Theodore Batsakis, told the court there were no words to express McCreary’s remorse.

Brenda Colon, Perez’s mother, said she’ll never have the chance to see her daughter accomplish the many good things that were ahead of her.

“You stole that from me,” Colon said. “I can’t forgive you because you knew what you were doing.”

Colon said her 15-year-old daughter doesn’t want to go to school and, missing her sister, often cries in her room. Plata, Anna Perez’s friend, said she couldn’t count how many times she wished she could talk with her, “just to hear her voice.”

The events leading to Perez’s death unfolded when McCreary saw a man leaning on his Chevy Impala upon returning to his car from a club above Shannon’s on Broadway. A member of McCreary’s group sucker-punched the man, but also clipped a woman.

When the woman’s girlfriend found out, the girlfriend grabbed a skateboard and slammed it on the back of McCreary’s car. McCreary grabbed a handgun and fired at the girlfriend in response, but hit Perez instead.

McCreary and his group then left the parking lot in the Impala. In the days following the shooting, he told others to hide the gun, to get rid of the clothes he wore and change the rims and tires on his car, prosecutor Karen Brako said.

McCreary was arrested less than a week after the shooting.

Perez had plans to attend Cypress College to work toward a nursing degree when she was killed, Colon said.

She was relieved after she heard the sentence, she said after the hearing. The family plans to hold an event to honor her daughter’s life on the five-year anniversary of her death next year.

Many have butterfly tattoos in honor of Perez, who said she wanted to go around the world as a butterfly after she died, Colon said.

“I’m happy it’s over now, but we’re never going to be at peace,” Colon said. “He broke us, but there is relief Anna got justice.”

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