For the Mireles and Segovia families, victims and witnesses to a 2023 mass shooting in Annapolis, the thought of being let down by the law was always there. But for some, it was expected.

After 11 days of arguments and testimony last month, a judge declared a mistrial in the triple murder case against Charles Robert Smith, who is accused of shooting six people in what turned into a violent dispute over a parked car.

Of the six, Mario Mireles, his father Nicolas Mireles and friend Christian Segovia Jr. were killed.

Anne Arundel Circuit Judge J. Michael Wachs preceded his decision by expressing regret toward the victims, the defendant, the attorneys and the public. But when it was delivered, members of both families poured out of the courtroom, crying.

“Since the beginning, I feel like this was coming,” said Harcinia Ruiz, whose son and former partner both died a few doors down from her own. “I don’t know why.”

The deadlock and Ruiz’s grief caused her to collapse, promptingsomeone to call for an ambulance. Paramedics soon surrounded her when a familiar face approached: a juror.

He came to apologize.

“He said, ‘You’re the mother. I don’t want you to feel pain again,'” Ruiz remembered in an interview Wednesday.

A mistrial was declared Feb. 26 after Wachs determined “transgressions” by Anne Arundel County State’s Attorney Anne Colt Leitess had prejudiced the case.

While it appeared Wachs’ limited schedule as a retired judge would push a retrial into next year, a new start date was set toward the end of September — the month Mario Mireles would have turned 30 and the son he has never met will turn 2.

“It’s just a lot, at least for me,” said Judi Abundez, Mario Mireles’ widow. “I already was feeling it for the first round, so now, it’s just going to be even more of a feeling.”

Wachs’ recused himself from the case last week because of what he described as a “public perception” of partiality, and that could change those court dates. The judge said he would make a final decision on his role by Friday.

On June 11, 2023, Shirley Smith, the defendant’s mother, demanded somebody move a car parked outside her house on the 1000 block of Paddington Place. She claimed it would prevent her son from parking his boat in the driveway. Mario Mireles, who was hosting a birthday party up the street for his brother, disagreed and an argument erupted.

When Charles Smith returned home and saw the squabble, witnesses said he quickly went inside and grabbed a gun. As he pointed it, Mireles grappled with him and was shot, as was Christian Segovia Jr., who was standing nearby.

As guests at the party ran over, Charles Smith went inside and began firing a rifle out of his front window. The “suppressive fire,” as the defense described it, injured three people and killed Nicolas Mireles, Mario’s father.

Police flooded the neighborhood and found Charles Smith behind his front door with his hands up. By then, a crowd had gathered outside, confused and angered. Smith would later testify that all the men he killed had weapons, making him afraid for his life.

To avoid the crowd, city officers snuck Charles Smith out of the house, through a hole in a back fence and into custody, launching a legal case now nearing its second year.

For some of the victims, it also marked what they considered the first example of irregular and preferential treatment toward the gunman, who is white.

“They would never do that for a Black person or a minority, you know,” Christian Segovia Sr. said. “No, they exhibit you as an animal.”

‘This needs to be treated Americans versus Americans’

Race has permeated Charles Smith’s case since his arrest.

The day after the shooting, the Capital Gazette reported that Shirley Smith and Mario Mireles had filed court actions against each other in 2016, signaling years of hostility between them. She accused him of causing problems in the neighborhood, and he accused her of harassing her neighbors of color since he was a kid.

Then, about a month later, a grand jury indicted Smith on 42 charges, including three felony hate crimes in the deaths of Mario Mireles, Nicolas Mireles and Christian Segovia Jr. Prosecutors hoped to prove at trial that Charles Smith’s hatred toward Hispanic people exacerbated the evening’s violence.

Conversely, in their self-defense argument, Charles Smith’s attorneys alluded to the criminal histories of the victims, particularly that of Mario Mireles.

The public defenders contended the Mireles brothers had a “reputation for violence” and asked police officers who testified at the trial how they knew them. Several said from working the beat or security jobs downtown, but one, the case’s lead detective, said he would have taken “caution” if he saw them on the street.

“What exactly are you being cautious of?” asked Mariana Segovia, Christian Segovia Jr.’s sister. “What exactly do you know that they’ve done that makes you think [that]? Because of the way they look? They’re young? There’s a lot of them? Tattoos? What is it?”

Echoing their client’s claims after his arrest, the defense also suggested the shooting victims may have been involved with the violent gang known as MS-13. But in January, prosecutors read an email into the record stating that the FBI had found no evidence connecting the mass shooting victims to the group.

Mariana Segovia and Abundez described much of Smith’s case as frustrating and non-linear, focusing on isolated incidents and insinuations of outside violence to discredit the victims.

“I don’t want this to be treated as Hispanics versus white man. This needs to be treated Americans versus Americans,” she said. “We’re Latino American but we’re still American.”

Public defender Denis O’Connell, who is leading Charles Smith’s defense in the retrial, declined a request for comment.

Little forensic evidence was presented in court to support the defendant’s claim that “hostiles,” as Smith called them, had shot at him. The only evidence at Paddington Placenot linked to either his handgun or rifle was a cartridge casing in a neighbor’s yard and two bullets recovered in or on his home.

But details of another gunman were scarce until Smith’s trial began.

Leitess, in her opening statement, said Luis Mireles had fired a gun to “try and stop this mass shooter from killing anyone else.” But only two eyewitnesses corroborated that account: Nelcy Goss, Mario and Luis Mireles’ sister, and her husband Ken.

Taking the stand, Nelcy Goss said when she learned about the other gun, she instructed her husband not to say anything — it was a secret they kept until a few weeks before trial. She said she had already lost one brother and was afraid of losing another.

In an interview, Nelcy Goss said it was “hard to have to come forward and talk about that,” adding she was not looking forward to possibly doing it again.

“At the end of the day, we were all the victims,” Nelcy Goss said. “My brother [Luis], in no way was he a threat. If anything, he was a hero trying to defend his brother and his dad and everyone else that was there at the party from possibly getting shot at as well.”

The wait for a ‘clean’ conviction

While different witnesses painted different pictures of what led to the shooting, including how Mario Mireles engaged his angered neighbor, most said Christian Segovia Jr. was only standing near his friend when he was killed.

The day the state’s chief medical examiner talked through her autopsy photos was the only day of trial the Segovia family missed.

“It’s extremely painful and traumatic to go through,” Christian Segovia Sr. said.

Speaking at his family’s home in Severn, his oldest son’s ashes in the other room, Segovia Sr. said he wasn’t expecting a mistrial “after all the pain.”

Though the jury was close to beginning deliberations, the whole case quickly toppled after Leitess’ cross-examination of the defendant, something she later equated to a fight but which the judge said had made the case “unfair” to Charles Smith.

Once it was over, Wachs determined the prosecutor had prejudiced Smith by alluding to inadmissible evidence and that she further misled the jury by insinuating Smith had conspired to prevent his mother from testifying.

The judge then rejected what he characterized as Leitess’ attempts to shift blame.

“I suggest you look at how you handled this case,” Wachs told her.

Despite that, members of both the Mireles and Segovia families said they still want Leitess to lead Smith’s prosecution.

“I’m very grateful for all the work she’s done,” Mariana Segovia said. “And I do think that maybe this case may have gotten to her a little bit. I don’t take away her human factor.”

Since Wachs’ decision, Mariana Segovia has gone to TikTok to talk through “the second worst day of her life.” Doing so, she said she felt the judge was making a “mockery” of the victims and their families.

As time has passed, however, she’s learned more about what happened: the how and, more importantly to her, the why.

“I understand he was just trying to protect us,” she said of Wachs, “because he wants the conviction to be foolproof … there can’t be anything to get overturned. We don’t want to do this again in two years.”

It was a realization her father agreed with.

“I want this guy to be in [prison] clean and for life,” Segovia Sr. said. “A victory for us, I guess, would be life without parole.”

Have a news tip? Contact Luke Parker at lparker@baltsun.com, 410-725-6214 and x.com/@lparkernews.