Man, 73, on trial in Father's Day 1992 murder

ON FATHER'S DAY 1992, Santiago Pedroso walked to a table in a crowded Germantown restaurant and fired five times at his wife's best friend, killing her, because he thought they were lovers, a prosecutor said yesterday.

"He thought they were having an affair," Assistant District Attorney Richard Sax said. "He thought his wife and Delores Alvarez were lesbians and he was being left behind."

After the shooting at the Hathaway Inn, on Chelten Avenue near Wissahickon, Pedroso, then 50, fled, Sax told a Common Pleas jury in his opening statement at Pedroso's murder trial.

Pedroso, who was born in Cuba, fled to New York, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela, and for 20 years he lived in the Philippines, where he remarried and had more children, the prosecutor said.

It wasn't until 2013, when Pedroso wanted to travel again - and he walked into the U.S. Embassy in Manila to get his U.S. passport and a computer went "ping!" - that authorities finally got him, Sax said. They realized that Pedroso was wanted on an arrest warrant in Philadelphia.

Pedroso, now 73, and thin with salt-and-pepper hair, sat between his defense lawyer, Richard Giuliani, and a Spanish interpreter at the defense table yesterday.

In a brief opening statement, Giuliani said that although it's true that Alvarez "died at the hands of another person," the question remains: "Who did it?"

Sax said that Pedroso was armed with not only two .38-caliber guns that Father's Day, June 21, 1992, but with "a malice so strong and an intent so evil and premeditated and planned."

About 7:30 p.m., the prosecutor said, Pedroso killed Alvarez, 41, in a restaurant filled with patrons and in front of his then-17-year-old daughter, Rachel, a Little Flower Catholic High School student; and his wife, Maria Jesus Gomez.

Pedroso had invited his daughter to dinner that day. They were sitting at a table in the restaurant when his wife and Alvarez walked inside, and Pedroso said to his daughter, "God sent her to me," referring to Alvarez, Sax said.

Alvarez was visiting from California, and because Pedroso didn't want her to stay at his house, he had kicked his wife and Alvarez out. The daughter went to live with her mother, too. The three did not tell Pedroso where they were living.

After seeing Alvarez in the restaurant, Pedroso walked the block to his home on Chelten Avenue, got at least one gun from the basement, then returned to the  restaurant, Sax said, with his daughter following him, "pleading and begging, 'Papi, don't do this!' "

He then walked to Alvarez and shot her above her right breast, twice in the neck, and in her face, Sax noted while pointing to a diagram of a female body. Pedroso then took out his second gun and put it to the side of Alvarez's head and fired again, Sax said.

Gomez died last year.

Rachel Pedroso, now 40, is expected to testify today.