A second jury determination resolved the central mental-state dispute that remained after Kevin Salazar was found guilty of first-degree murder.
LOS ANGELES, Calif. — The murder case against Kevin Eduardo Cataneo Salazar ultimately required jurors to answer two different questions: whether he deliberately killed Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Ryan Clinkunbroomer, and whether severe mental illness made him legally insane when he did it. The jury answered both against Salazar.
Salazar, 32, was found guilty Aug. 24 of first-degree murder in the 2023 ambush killing of Clinkunbroomer in Palmdale. After that verdict, jurors remained for a separate sanity phase because Salazar had pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. On Sept. 2, they found him legally sane at the time of the shooting. He is scheduled for sentencing Oct. 1 and faces life in prison without the possibility of parole. The two-part proceeding placed evidence of planning alongside extensive testimony and argument about Salazar’s psychiatric history.
The distinction mattered because a diagnosis of mental illness does not, by itself, establish legal insanity. The defense described Salazar as someone who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and had experienced hallucinations and deeply held delusional beliefs. His lawyer argued that those symptoms affected his ability to understand the moral nature of his conduct. Mental-health experts presented by the defense had examined Salazar and his records and concluded that he met the legal standard for insanity when the deputy was killed.
Prosecutors did not rely on a claim that Salazar had never been mentally ill. Instead, they asked jurors to examine what he actually did before, during and after the Sept. 16, 2023, shooting. They argued that his conduct showed purposeful decision-making: he followed a marked sheriff’s vehicle after it left the Palmdale station, approached the deputy at a traffic light, fired and then left the area. Prosecutors also pointed to Salazar’s later statements as evidence that he understood his conduct rather than acting without awareness of right and wrong.
One of the most significant pieces of mental-state evidence came from a conversation secretly recorded after Salazar was jailed. Prosecutors told jurors that Salazar spoke to undercover operatives about wanting to kill a police officer for years. According to the prosecution, he described following law enforcement officers, parking nearby and using music to prepare himself. Prosecutors said those statements supported their argument that the killing represented a long-standing intention rather than an act whose wrongfulness Salazar could not understand.
The defense challenged that interpretation. Rosenstock argued that Salazar’s behavior had to be viewed through the lens of a serious psychiatric disorder rather than treated automatically as evidence of rational planning. Evidence in the sanity phase described auditory hallucinations and beliefs involving outside forces controlling or harming him. At earlier stages of the case, Salazar had also said that he had begun hearing voices years before the shooting. The defense maintained that his abnormal behavior and psychiatric history were central to understanding why the killing occurred.
Before jurors reached that legal dispute, however, prosecutors had first established the physical sequence of the crime. Clinkunbroomer was on duty on Sept. 16, 2023, when he drove away from the Palmdale sheriff’s station in a marked patrol vehicle. He stopped at a red light less than a block away. Investigators said Salazar, driving another vehicle, had followed him from the station. Surveillance video showed a car approach the deputy’s vehicle, pause near it and then speed away. Clinkunbroomer was left mortally wounded inside his patrol unit.
A passerby found the deputy and sought help. Clinkunbroomer was transported to a hospital but died from his injuries. He was 30. The location of the attack — near the station, in daylight and while he was sitting in an unmistakably marked law enforcement vehicle — made the shooting an immediate focus of an intensive search. Investigators collected surveillance video and asked the public for help identifying a dark-colored Toyota Corolla believed to have been involved.
A separate encounter on the road helped investigators narrow the search. A motorist reported an aggressive confrontation with another driver minutes before the shooting and had photographed that vehicle’s license plate. Authorities used the plate information as they investigated Salazar. Evidence presented in court showed that detectives later obtained warrants and searched his Palmdale home, where a .22-caliber revolver was recovered. Salazar was arrested two days after Clinkunbroomer’s death.
The evidence from the crime scene and investigation formed the basis of the guilt phase. Jurors found Salazar guilty of first-degree murder after about 2 1/2 hours of deliberations. They also found true special-circumstance allegations that the killing involved a peace officer, lying in wait and firing from a vehicle. The panel determined that Salazar personally used and discharged the .22-caliber revolver. Those findings showed that jurors accepted the prosecution’s description of the killing as a planned attack on a uniformed deputy.
The case also brought repeated attention to the life interrupted by the shooting. Clinkunbroomer had served in the Sheriff’s Department for about eight years and had worked from the Palmdale station since 2018. He had become a field training officer, a job that placed him in a role teaching newer deputies how to handle patrol duties. His father and grandfather had also served in the department, making law enforcement service a longstanding part of his family history.
Only four days before his death, Clinkunbroomer had become engaged to be married. Co-workers said he was looking toward marriage, hoped to have a family and wanted to continue developing his career, including a possible move into detective work. The contrast between those plans and the sudden attack became part of the way colleagues and relatives remembered him. Memorials appeared near the Palmdale station, and law enforcement officers accompanied his body in a long procession after his death.
Nearly three years later, the trial separated two issues that are often discussed together but carry different legal meanings. The guilt verdict established that Salazar committed first-degree murder and that the charged special circumstances were proven. The later sanity finding determined that his documented psychiatric illness did not satisfy the legal test required for an insanity verdict in this case. The second decision meant that the criminal judgment would lead toward imprisonment rather than a commitment based on an insanity finding.
Salazar is due in Los Angeles County Superior Court on Oct. 1 before Judge Ronald S. Coen. The sentencing hearing follows the jury’s guilt verdict and its rejection of the insanity defense, leaving punishment as the next scheduled stage. For Clinkunbroomer’s family and former colleagues, the hearing will come three years after the deputy left his station for a routine patrol and was killed before he had traveled even a block.
Author note: Last updated September 30, 2026.