Bucks jury convicts Phila. man of 1st-degree murder

A Bucks County jury on Thursday found a Philadelphia man guilty of first-degree murder in the carjacking and execution-style slaying of an immigrant carpenter and convicted him of raping the man's girlfriend.

Omar Sharif Cash, 28, sat quietly as the foreman responded "guilty" on all counts: murder, rape, kidnapping, robbery, and related charges in the May 2008 crimes. The six-man, six-woman jury had deliberated for 61/2 hours over two days.

The jurors will return to court Friday to begin deliberating whether Cash should be sentenced to death for killing Edgar Rosas-Gutierrez, 32, on a roadside embankment in Bensalem.

Cash also awaits trial in Philadelphia on charges that he murdered a 19-year-old man at a car wash on Frankford Avenue in April 2008.

Philadelphia police were seeking his arrest in that case when he carjacked Rosas-Gutierrez, who was leaving Jalapeño Joe's, a club in the city's Crescentville section, with his girlfriend.

Bucks County Deputy District Attorney Marc Furber said he was "very pleased" with the verdict. He declined to comment further, as did the victims' families.

Cash's family and friends sobbed in a courthouse corridor after the verdict. They, too, declined to comment.

Michael Goodwin, who will represent Cash during the penalty phase of the trial, said his job "will be to show the jury who it is they are sentencing." He did not elaborate.

In his closing argument Wednesday, Furber said Cash had been desperate for a way out of town when he forced Rosas-Gutierrez to drive toward Bucks County. During the drive, Cash raped Rosas-Gutierrez's girlfriend in the backseat.

They were "the perfect victims" for Cash, Furber said. "They were tools to him. . . . He didn't think they would be missed; they were illegal immigrants."

After shooting Rosas-Gutierrez in the head, Cash resumed brutalizing the Brazilian-born woman, Furber said, raping her twice more before she escaped from the Lawrenceville, N.J., motel where had taken her.

The woman, 43, testified about the ordeal last week, sobbing on the witness stand.

"If she was acting, she deserves the Academy Award," Furber had said.