Miguel Gaitan's sentence reduced in 1993 murders of Outlook family

Thirty years after a Yakima County Superior Court judge said he lacked remorse, Miguel Gaitan apologized Monday for slaughtering an Outlook family.

“I apologize to the Skelton family. I took everything from you,” Gaitan said in court at his resentencing hearing. “I wish I could go back to what happened. I am deeply sorry for the pain and the anguish and the loss I have caused.”

While Judge Kevin Naught said Gaitan coming back to the county where his crime horrified and terrified residents in 1993 and apologizing was worth noting, he said that the sentence he was constrained to give Gaitan did little to provide justice for the family that Gaitan and an accomplice stabbed and beat to death when they were 14.

“People would see the Outlook sign and say ‘Here is where the Skelton family got murdered,’” Naught said. “Now, I wonder if they will say this is where the killers’ lives were worth more than their victims’ lives.”

Gaitan, now 45, was originally sentenced in December 1993 to four consecutive life-without-parole sentences for aggravated first-degree murder in the Skelton family’s killings. Monday, he was resentenced to four concurrent 25-year-to-life sentences Monday, which means that, having served 30 years in prison already, could be released any time a state sentencing board determines he can be safely released.

Gaitan’s original sentence was deemed unconstitutional by rulings at the U.S Supreme Court and the state Supreme Court that found such sentences constituted cruel and unusual punishment for teenagers.

At Monday’s hearing, Gaitan’s attorneys and Yakima County Prosecuting Attorney Joe Brusic — who was a deputy prosecutor at the time of the attack — presented the court with an agreed recommendation to an indeterminate sentence that recognized Gaitan’s youth and immaturity at the time of the attacks.

Paul Holland, one of Gaitan’s attorneys, said Naught’s ruling reflected a recognition of Gaitan’s youth at the time of the crime.

Brusic said it was not a decision he made easily or willingly.

“Prosecutors are hamstrung through the decisions made by the Supreme Court of Washington over time since Miller,” Brusic said, referring to the 2012 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that outlawed mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juvenile offenders.

Subsequent state Supreme Court rulings found that any life-without-parole sentence for a juvenile was unconstitutional, along with any indeterminate sentence that was tantamount to a life sentence, such as a 46-year-to-life sentence that was struck down in a 2021 case.

In that same case, State v. Haag, the state’s high court established the standard for resentencing juveniles who were previously given life-without-parole sentences. Lower courts must consider the offender’s youth and incomplete brain development at the time of the crime, as well as efforts the juvenile has made at rehabilitation since their conviction.

Brusic said that meant that running even two of the sentences consecutively would create an unconstitutional life sentence. He said the court also had to look at Gaitan’s case going forward to see if he was capable of redemption rather than consider the horrific impact his crime caused the Skelton family and the county.

‘Senseless annihilation’

Gaitan and Joel Ramos, who was also 14 at the time, forced their way into the Skelton family’s Liberty Road home March 24, 1993, where Gaitan ambushed Michael Skelton, who was disabled from an industrial accident and needed a cane to walk. He was stabbed 17 times.

Lynn Skelton, his wife, was killed while taking a shower. Her autopsy determined she took 10 blows to the head and had 53 stab wounds, some of them defensive wounds as she fought off Gaitan.

Jason Skelton, 12, and a classmate of the killers, was bludgeoned and stabbed multiple times.

Ramos and Gaitan killed 6-year-old Bryan Skelton, who was hiding under his bedsheets, stabbing him and beating him with a log from the woodstove.

“The biggest impact I saw was what it did to the sheriff’s detectives and deputies who responded,” said Brusic, who was a deputy prosecutor at the time. “It was devastating. It changed several lives.”

He said the “senseless annihilation” of a family was something that outraged county residents.

Naught said that Bryan Skelton’s killing was the one that horrified people the most.

Gaitan went on trial as an adult for four aggravated first-degree murder charges, and then-Judge Heather Van Nuys sentenced him to four consecutive life terms, telling Gaitan at his sentencing that he would die in prison.

Rough childhood

But Melissa Lee, one of Gaitan’s attorneys, said since then the courts have become more informed about how human brains do not fully mature until about 25, an understanding that the court and the corrections system did not possess at that time.

“The resentencing requires us to hold on to a tension between the harm Miguel was responsible for, and recognition of the fact that the young boy who committed that offense is now a man who has gone through a lot of maturity,” Lee said.

Marnee Milner, a forensic psychologist, testified that Gaitan had multiple cognitive, academic and emotional issues dating back to when a car his father was working on rolled back and hit him at age 1. He was in special education through most of his childhood and was two grades behind his peers in school, Milner said.

Gaitan’s father was also abusive toward him and his mother, Milner said. Gaitan’s father was reconciling with his family when he was killed in a homicide.

“What we know of children who have been abused, is they want to maintain contact and are vying for some connection with their abuser,” Milner said. “They don’t know that anything is wrong until they are shown, ‘Hey, this is not how children are supposed to be treated.’”

When she interviewed him for six hours over the course of two days, Milner said she found Gaitan to be an introvert who was thinking about how he got to where he is now, and what he can do to improve himself, such as withdrawing from prison gang life.

In her report, Milner found that Gaitan’s initial reluctance to talk about the crime may have been an effort to try to psychologically protect himself from what he did.

Prison life

Dan Pacholke, former secretary of the state Department of Corrections a prison consultant, said he met with Gaitan, and Gaitan’s first years in prison were much different — and more brutal — than they would be today for a 14-year-old who was incarcerated.

Gaitan, he said, was initially placed in an intensive management unit — essentially solitary confinement — for his own protection for the first two years.

“In 1996, those units were in slow-motion riots,” Pacholke said, explaining the units were overcrowded and the solitary confinement contributed to behavior issues among inmates.

“It would be hard for someone who is basically a child, a teenager of small stature and size. It probably shaped his opinion of the department managing someone like him.”

Today, he said someone like Gaitan would be placed in a juvenile rehabilitation facility first, associating with others his own age before being introduced into a prison environment.

When Gaitan was moved into the general population at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, he was fearful of sharing a cell with three older men, but one of the men introduced him to gang life to find protection within the prison, Pacholke said.

As a lifer, Gaitan was denied some of the programs in prison that work toward reforming people, Pacholke said, such as education and job training. But he said Gaitan was able, on his own, to earn his GED and to take jobs in the kitchen, a dog training program and the visiting room.

Gaitan, Pacholke said, renounced gang life and was transferred to the Twin Rivers Unit and the Monroe Correctional Center, a unit for inmates who would be vulnerable in general population, and for the past 10 years has not had a major violation.

Jacob Schmitt, who served time with Gaitan at Twin Rivers, described how Gaitan would spend months buying food from the prison commissary and making holiday meals using a microwave for some of his fellow inmates.

When Gaitan is released, Schmitt said he will take him into his own home and work with him on his re-entry into society.

Not justice

Naught said he reviewed the witness testimony from Gaitan’s 1993 trial, as well as the briefings from Brusic and Gaitan’s legal teams.

While he conceded that Gaitan was immature at the time of the killings, he did not consider what Gaitan did to be the act of a child lacking impulse control or subjected to peer pressure.

Gaitan had approached a classmate at school the month before the killings and asked he wanted to “go to the county and do some damage?” He also stockpiled knives and gloves before the killing and, having been a friend of Jason Skelton, knew the layout of the house and planned which doors he and Ramos would go through during the attack, Naught said.

The thoroughness of the attack, which Naught said the records indicated lasted two hours, also goes against this being a rash, impulsive act.

“At every stage, they had the opportunity to stop,” Naught said.

And he had an appreciation for the consequences, Naught said, because the record indicated he prayed before heading out that God would forgive him for what he was about to do and was hiding evidence of the crime afterward.

Rather than being pressured into the killings, Gaitan was the one urging Ramos on to kill Bryan Skelton. And despite Milner’s assertion that Gaitan did not speak much of the crime at the time as a way of denying it happened, Naught said the record showed that Gaitan confessed to police, which was suppressed at his trial, and told others about what had happened.

While Gaitan’s request to go to Twin Rivers could be seen as an act of self-preservation rather than redemption, Naught said he was impressed that Gaitan would come back to court in Yakima County and finally acknowledge what he had done.

Naught also pointed out some of the irony that was interwoven the case. While people were concerned that Gaitan have the best life he could, he denied that opportunity to Jason and Bryan Skelton. And had just one of the Skelton family survived the massacre, Gaitan would be getting a much longer sentence, Naught said.

“I find (the agreement) is justice for Miguel Gaitan. It is not justice for Michael Skelton,” Naught said. “It is not justice for Lynn Skelton, who worked at a grocery store to support her family. It is not justice for Jason Skelton. It is not justice for Bryan Skelton, a 6-year-old who was crying for mercy, and you tucked him in bed before killing him.”

Ramos entered a plea agreement and was sentenced to four consecutive 20-year-to-life sentences after pleading guilty to four first-degree murder charges, which was extended to a minimum of 85 years in 2013. Ramos has since been released from prison.