OTAY MESA, San Diego — An El Cajon man appeared in a Memphis, Tennessee courtroom Monday morning to face one charge of murder and two charges of attempted murder in Otay Mesa.
49-year-old Albert Lee Blake was on the run since Nov. 6 after a shooting at Church's Chicken in Otay Mesa. After weeks as a fugitive, a U.S. Marshals task force captured Blake in Memphis on Friday and he'll be extradited back to San Diego County soon.
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According to court documents from the Chula Vista courthouse, Blake faces 25 years to life if he's convicted of murdering Church's Chicken manager Maribel Ibanez after staff at the restaurant turned Blake away for trying to pay with a counterfeit bill. She was 28 years old.
"I love her so much," said Ibanez's sister. "It's hard."
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A GoFundMe page is available to help her family with funeral expenses. She's remembered as "a loving daughter, sister and aunt" who had recently married.
According to court documents, two other male coworkers were injured in the shooting: Humberto Gerardo Cota and Mario Rojas.
Another GoFundMe page was also set up to help Mario with expenses. Rojas was treated for injuries at a local hospital, then released.
According to public records, Blake has been arrested approximately a dozen times in San Diego County since 1987.
According to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, he has been sentenced to CDCR four times in the past.
On June 1, 1990, he was sentenced to two years in prison for two separate cases. One conviction was for second degree burglary and one was for receiving stolen property. This occurred outside of San Diego County. He was sentenced to two consecutive terms.
Then, he was sentenced to two years in prison in 1992 for possession of a firearm by an ex-felon. The court made the sentence concurrent to the one he had previously served in 1990.
He was sentenced to CDCR a third time in 1997, this time for three years, for possession of cocaine for sale. His most recent sentencing to CDCR, his fourth, was in 2002. He was sentenced to three years in prison for inflicting corporal injury on a spouse or cohabitant. He was last paroled on January 2, 2004 and was discharged from parole on February 1, 2005.