By Jorge Casuso

March 1, 2012 -- Four alleged gang members who gunned down a 20-year-old Santa Monica man at Virginia Avenue Park in 2009 have been sentenced and could serve life terms, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

Patrick Dwight Birdsong Jr., 21, was sentenced Tuesday. The other three Taaj Zakee Martin, 20;
Norman Lovan Cole, 36, and Sean Alex Mermer, 31, were sentenced February 21, according to the the Sheriffs Department.

The four men were found guilty in the fatal shooting of Richard Manuel Juarez, a graduate of Olympic High School, at a crime-prone corner of the Pico Neighborhood on November 3.

Juarez was one of four individuals who were in the park when two suspects walked towards them from Pico Boulevard and began shooting, police said. The other three fled and avoided being shot.

A police sergeant driving in the area heard the shots and saw two men running from the park toward a vehicle occupied by two other men. The officer followed the vehicle, and the two suspects on foot escaped.

Police detained the vehicle and its occupants and established a perimeter to contain the two suspects who fled. All four men were arrested.

Juarez was the nephew of former City Council candidate Frank Juarez, who ran for office in 2000 after two other nephews Anthony Robert Juarez and his brother, Michael Anthony Juarez, were gunned down during a string of shootings that rocked the beachside city in 1999.

The violence started the previous fall when four victims were killed in what police said was a war between rival Santa Monica and Culver City gangs.

Throughout the decade, the violence continued to take the lives of young Santa Monica residents in or near the Pico Neighborhood. In 2005, Johnathan Hernandez, Hector Bonilla and Jesse Becerra were killed, two of the young men brazenly shot multiple times during a local birthday party.

The following year the longstanding gang problem in the Pico Neighborhood took the life of popular Santa Monica High student Eddie Lopez, who was not affiliated with gangs. It also claimed
22-year-old Santa Monica resident Miguel Martin, who was gunned down in Virginia Avenue Park, the site of Richard Juarez's killing.

In 2008, Preston Brumfield died of injuries suffered when he was assaulted near the same park, and one month later and less than three blocks away, Byron Lopez, a 28-year-old Latino man, was gunned down.

The fatal shooting of Richard Juarez would mark the 40th killing in the violence-prone neighborhood since 1989.