A man accused of sending multiple threatening messages to an Orange County Superior Court judge testified Wednesday in federal court in Santa Ana that the emails and social media postings were meant to be jokes.
Byrom Zuniga Sanchez, 33, formerly of Laguna Niguel, is on trial for two counts of threats by interstate and foreign communication for allegedly sending the threats after a contentious custody dispute in Family Law court over his then-5-year-old son. Zuniga Sanchez, who is acting as his own attorney, questioned himself in his testimony.
Zuniga Sanchez’s elliptical ramblings in his testimony revolved around explaining the violent and crude words in his messages to Orange County Superior Court Judge Sandy Leal’s courtroom. He played videos of himself insulting her with curses as well as a music video he sent to the judge that he said he found “hilarious.”
To make his case that he was spending much of his time in 2023 writing “comedy,” he said his Instagram’s bio included that he did “interior painting and remodeling, specializing in attics.”
“This is a joke for those who understand I’m referencing a uterus,” Zuniga Sanchez said of specializing in attics. “To me, that is hilarious.”
At the time he was accused of sending the threats in mid-2023, “The majority of my day was working on comedy. I was working on comedy skits for 10 or 20 different characters.”
He asked himself how much of that time did he spend “brooding” over his custody case and he replied, “Really none of my time.”
Zuniga Sanchez said that some of his Instagram posts were the kind that “self-deletes after 24 hours… You’ve got to be there at the right time to laugh along.”
One of the posts refers to “Moe the Muslim,” a character that he said was “playing off of Muslim stereotypes.”
He noted one of his favorite jokes to post on social media was, “What is the square root of your family tree in Alabama — your first cousin.”
He asked himself if he believed that he was “genuinely” engaged in “lawful exercising of his First Amendment rights,” and he replied, “Yes… I’m not an attorney, but to the best of my knowledge I was within my First Amendment rights.”
Zuniga Sanchez said that his July email asking if Friday the 13th in October “works for you” for an active shooter attack was not serious.
“I mean, really, July to October? That gives so much time for people to find me,” he said. “It’s not rational to consider this as serious.”
He also sought to explain one alleged threat in which he refers to himself as a gorilla, saying that “we area really close to 90% of the DNA of gorillas.”
He said in the message, “I am the gorilla and I will murder everything responsible for traumatizing my son. (Expletive) you and your abuse of laws, dirty whore.”
“It doesn’t say every one,” Zuniga Sanchez testified. “It says every thing.”
He testified, “Probably the most dangerous thing I could do is hurt someone with my words.”
In the two years after he lost the custody case, Zuniga Sanchez said he was on a “mission to wage war against corruption in Family Court.”
He said Family Court can do good and could “have spared me an awful childhood,” but he felt that it had failed him in his custody battle.
Zuniga Sanchez also referred to the Second Amendment in his messages because, “We have the right to bear arms over a tyrannical government… I guess it means you have the right to stop the courts from abducting someone’s child.”
He claimed to be “earning about $600,000 a year” and felt that the “significant portion of state and federal taxes” he paid entitled him to tell Leal to resign from her job.
He showed jurors a photo of himself crying that he sent to the judge.
“The only time I can cry is when I take mushrooms or LSD,” he said, adding that all of the “trauma” in his life has left him with difficulty with expressing feelings.
In one of the messages he sent to the judge he said, “Your suicide won’t suffice.”
The emails he sent to the judge came as he was “putting out an exorbitant amount of content… and these emails are a speck of dust being flicked out there,” Zuniga Sanchez testified.
The point of the outrageous language was “to get adults to the table in family court to review” his case, he said. “It’s kind of like what do I have to do to get the FBI to call me, to get the police to call me.”
He acknowledged writing in one email, “Sandy, it is time to die. I am more committed to murdering you than to being present as a father… I am going to shove a funnel into you and piss in it.”
In one of the emails that he read aloud to the jury he referred to the mother of his son as a “retarded bitch,” and accused Leal of “psychologically terrorizing children to satisfy a man-hating agenda.”
He wrote that he will ensure that “every rotten heart in that courtroom dies in Mexican fashion.” He added that the judge is “weaker than a porn star’s collapsed sphincter… You are the reason fathers will bear arms to protect their children.”
He also wrote, “Do you have any last words before I lawfully kill you?”
He compared the judge to a “light switch” he can turn off and “tear out of the wall.”
In his question to himself about the lengthy email he said, “your statements are a little all over the place” and claimed in that in some places he declared “you’re all going to die but also going to live a tormented life.”
Zuniga Sanchez said “There was no proofreading. I just sent it off… I felt there were things that Judge Leal did not know, perhaps wasn’t privy to… I don’t know any litigants submitting filings with this much seasoning in their words. I felt my speech had been muted. I had been silenced. I felt that the attorneys were like go sit down and let the adults handle this. So there’s no filter, a lot of flavor in this.”
Zuniga Sanchez testified, “So much of this was parody… If I was finding something hilarious at someone else’s expense then thanks for taking one for the team.”
Zuniga Sanchez said he has “never been in” Leal’s courtroom “ever.” The trial was “our first time meeting,” which prosecutors dispute.
Under cross-examination from a prosecutor, Zuniga Sanchez denied that any of his emails contained threats. And when asked if he wrote the emails, he skirted around the question, pointing out that they had redactions and he could not claim full authorship.
“There’s not a single threat communicated,” he said. “There is not a single threat in here.”
Closing arguments are expected Thursday afternoon.