JUDGE SENTENCES STUDENT'S KILLER TO PRISON.

Byline: Karen Maeshiro Daily News Staff Writer

A young ex-convict was sentenced Thursday to 23 years to life in prison for fatally shooting a 16-year-old honor student after she demanded that he return her telephone pager.

Outside court, Manuel Sanchez Jr.'s mother attempted to apologize to the father of the girl he killed. But Nicole Inuma's father gestured for her to stay back.

"There's nothing to say to them," said Arthur Inuma, 41, of West Hills, who waited for his daughter at a Palmdale McDonald's restaurant with the food they had ordered while she went to retrieve her pager from Sanchez's apartment next door. "There's no closure to this. He's alive; my daughter isn't."

Sanchez, 21, was convicted in January of second-degree murder and felony possession of a firearm in the killing of Nicole Inuma, a student leader at Littlerock High School whom the defendant had met three weeks earlier.

Inuma was shot and killed May 6, 1994, two days before her 17th birthday on Mother's Day.

When Inuma was killed, Sanchez had been on parole for four months after he was sentenced to 16 months in prison for receiving stolen property.

His criminal record dates to when he was 14, and he has been in and out of youth facilities and prisons since then. In 1988, he was arrested - and later convicted - for robbery, burglary and false imprisonment.

The next year, he was arrested on suspicion of possessing a weapon at a school. He violated his parole in 1991, then was arrested in 1993 for receiving stolen property.

Sanchez initially told investigators that a man who had knocked on the front door shot Inuma, but he later claimed the girl was shot accidentally when he removed a gun from his waistband while the two were making out on a bed, court records show.

Authorities believe Inuma and Sanchez got into an argument, and Sanchez hit her on the head with the gun, then shot her in the chest, court records show.

Then Sanchez changed his shoes, washed his hands to get rid of the gunpowder residue, put the gun inside the rear bed of a pickup truck in the McDonald's drive-through and dialed 911 from a pay telephone at the restaurant, as the girl's father waited inside.

If Sanchez had called 911 quickly for help, instead of washing his hands and changing his shoes, Inuma might have lived, homicide Detective Cheryl Comstock said, according to court records.

Lancaster Superior Court Judge Frank Jackson cited actions by Sanchez after the shooting in denying a defense motion to reduce the jury's verdict to a charge of manslaughter.

Jackson noted the pager was found in a dirt planter, that three bruises on the girl's head were probably caused by Sanchez, that he told two different accounts, and that rather than go to a neighbor's house to call for help, Sanchez chose to use the phone at the McDonald's.

"Before he goes to McDonald's, he finds the time to change his shoes," Jackson added.

Sanchez's 22-year-old brother, Victor Sanchez, said that his mother, Maria Ontiveros, wanted to talk to the victim's father and say she is very sorry about what happened to Nicole.

"It's kind of understandable," Sanchez said of the father's refusal to talk.

The defendant wrote a letter to his family saying he was remorseful, the brother said.

"He says that he's sorry about what he did and that he knows he's been in trouble, but he promises to change. He has learned his lesson," Sanchez said.