Nearly six years after being charged with murdering his friend, Leif Ames is out on bail and has yet to face a jury. How?

For the past 3½ years, Leif Ames’ LinkedIn shows he has run his own tech business in Santa Clara County. Sources say he has gone out on dates, and he has attended at least one live music show. He actively maintains his own website, where he posts photos of mountain biking treks. 

His normal-seeming life belies an extraordinary reality: In March 2020, Ames was charged with stabbing his longtime best friend, Hubert Cross, 23 times inside Ames’ Live Oak home, killing him. Almost instantly, court records show, he was on the phone with the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office describing what he had done. Officers later reported that Ames “made admissions about stabbing the victim with a knife.” 

Ames, now 40, was immediately charged with first-degree murder. But more than five years after the stabbing, he has yet to face a jury, and has spent most of that time out on bail. Attorneys within the local justice system have characterized Ames’ case as extraordinary. Few defendants charged with such serious crimes get to live life outside of custody before their day in court. Recent changes to bail amounts in the county show local judges don’t want it to ever happen again.  

The Santa Cruz County District Attorney’s Office has worked for years to try to put Ames back in a jail cell. At least one county judge, prosecutors and Cross’ family say they believe Ames belongs behind bars while awaiting trial. In court records, prosecutors argue that the unpredictable nature of the crime, combined with Ames’ drug and alcohol history and the conclusion by two court-appointed psychologists that a psychosis fed by substance abuse played a role in the killing, makes Ames an “extreme danger to the community.”

Ames has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, and his lawyers have attested in court that he had stopped using drugs, including pot, hallucinogenics and alcohol, two weeks before the stabbing. This could be an important detail, as being under the influence of drugs at the time of a crime does not count as “insanity.” His bail conditions initially included no location monitoring, nor restrictions on possession of controlled substances, cannabis or alcohol, court records show.   

Ames is scheduled to face a jury later this month. That is, unless the start of the trial is postponed again, which Santa Cruz County Superior Court Judge Stephen Siegel has granted on six different occasions since the trial was originally scheduled to begin in March 2022. 

On Monday, Ames’ attorney requested another postponement, to next year. Siegel was scheduled to decide whether to approve that request at a hearing on Wednesday, but he was absent and a visiting judge moved the hearing to Tuesday, Oct. 14.

Looking ahead to a possible upcoming trial, Santa Cruz County District Attorney Jeff Rosell and the lead prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Kristal Salcido, were hesitant to speak publicly about the case, citing concerns that they could “prejudice the jury pool.” Neither Jamyrson Pittori, Ames’ current defense attorney, nor Ames responded to multiple requests for comment. Lookout’s reporting relies primarily on court records and transcripts. 

“We have done everything we can to keep him in custody and we still believe he is a danger to society,” Salcido, who has led the prosecution for years, told Lookout.

All the while, Hubert Cross’ family has been left questioning the fairness of the county’s justice system. More than five years after her brother was killed, Rachel Cross sees the judicial process as “a constellation of things lining up that has given [Ames] all the benefits and us the short end of the stick.” 

“The fact that [he] can roam the streets and interact with unsuspecting citizens day in and day out is crazy,” she told Lookout from her home in Central America in July. “This is literally every woman’s worst Tinder date nightmare.” 

The killing

When sheriff’s deputies arrived to arrest Ames at his home in Live Oak on March 21, 2020, it was not the first time they had interacted with him that evening.

Less than two hours earlier, a deputy stood at Ames’ doorstep — at the request of Ames’ family, court records show — intently listening as he explained he was coronavirus #1, manufacturing the virus in his mouth, and how he had lately been experiencing blackout hallucinations involving President Donald Trump, according to law enforcement testimony during a Nov. 19, 2020, pretrial hearing.

After a roughly 10-minute welfare check, Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Deputy Nathan Engelhardt determined Ames to be “coherent and healthy.” In that November 2020 pre-trial testimony, Engelhardt said his instincts told him Ames didn’t require an involuntary psychiatric detention. Nonetheless, Engelhardt offered to take Ames to the hospital if he was feeling ill, but Ames declined. According to Engelhardt, Ames told him, “I’m hearing a voice in my head and the voice is telling me that if I go with you, the virus is going to kill me.” Engelhardt left. 

A day earlier, Hubert Cross had taken Ames for an evaluation at a county behavioral health clinic. Soon after Engelhardt left, Louis Ames, Leif’s brother, reached out to Cross and asked him to do a second welfare check on Ames, according to court transcripts.

Cross, 35 at the time, was a husband with two young children. He and Ames had worked together on the tech side of Universal Audio in Scotts Valley, but Cross’ sister said their relationship stretched back two decades. Rachel Cross told Lookout that Hubert was a close confidant of Ames and the pair had been friends since high school. 

According to court records, Cross arrived at the house and found Ames on the phone with his brother. When Cross went to retrieve a glass of water for his friend, Ames grabbed a knife. 

“Ames stabbed Cross 23 times, killing him,” Appeals Court Justice Allison Danner wrote in a May 2022 court filing. “Ames called the police and reported that he had stabbed his best friend to death with a knife. Ames said Cross was ‘a corona agent.’”

According to testimony from Det. Erik Miyoshi, who later spoke with Louis Ames, Louis was still on the phone with his brother as Leif Ames stabbed Cross to death. 

Miyoshi said Ames told the dispatcher “he was a horrible friend, kind of expressing remorse for realizing that the corona issue was his friend Hubert Cross.” 

“I love you man, please don’t die,” he told Cross while on the phone with a 911 operator, Miyoshi said. Then, according to Miyoshi, Ames said, “Oh my God, what the f–k did I do?”

Engelhardt said when he arrived at the home a second time, Ames immediately surrendered himself. 

“He was very polite,” Engelhardt recalled. “He was very compliant.” 

Court records show police found water bottles of LSD in Ames’ fridge, trace amounts of DMT (dimethyltryptamine) on a smoking pipe, and he admitted to using MDMA, kratom, cannabis and binging on nitrous oxide, as well as drinking a 12-pack of beer every night, though he would tell investigators he had stopped all intoxicants about two weeks before the killing. Two court-appointed psychologists determined the homicide happened during a “brief, unsettled psychosis relating to substance abuse.” 

Justice delayed

For those who spend their lives within the courthouse hive, waiting more than five years for the start of a first-degree murder trial is typical. Calendar conflicts, vacations, requests for more prep time and changes in attorneys or circumstances are often unavoidable hurdles in the marathon toward justice. Ames’ case has had 49 separate scheduled court dates since March 2020, before eight different county judges and a panel of three appellate court justices.

“The wheels of justice move slowly,” Santa Cruz County District Attorney Jeff Rosell told Lookout. 

Yet, regardless of where they sit, sources who spoke with Lookout agree that it is extraordinary for someone facing a first-degree murder charge to spend any time out on bail.

The steps that led to Ames’ release began in the days following Cross’ death. 

Four days after the killing, Santa Cruz County Superior Court Judge Timothy Volkmann set bail at $750,000. That was $20,000 less than the amount recommended by the court’s bail schedule for first-degree murder with a deadly weapon.

A bail schedule is county-specific guidance on where to set bail for an offense, though judges retain full discretion over how to set bail and whether to deny it. The county’s superior court judges would later raise the recommended bail for first-degree murder to $1 million in 2023. This year, for a defendant with the same charge, they recommended local judges deny bail entirely.

But in March 2020, the recommendation was lower, $750,000 for first-degree murder, higher if the crime involved a deadly weapon. Prosecutor Michael McKinney argued that bail should be set at $770,000 due to the weapons charge. Ames’ public defender, Stephen Prekoski, pushed back, arguing that $750,000 would be enough to keep Ames in custody. Nobody suggested that Ames should be denied bail.

“I don’t think a $20,000 difference is going to make Mr. Ames releasable, your honor,” Prekoski said, according to court transcripts. “So could we just leave it where it is?” 

Without protest from McKinney, Volkmann agreed. 

Speaking to Lookout by phone last month, Prekoski said the bail setting ultimately boiled down to a common belief among those working in the legal system at the time: high bail was effectively no bail.  

“What I think happened is that we were all just plugged into our basic assumption that, in 99 out of 100 cases, when you’re talking about $750,000, that amounts to no bail,” Prekoski said.  

For the next 18 months following that March 2020 bail hearing, Ames remained in county jail and prosecutors didn’t raise the issue of denying him the possibility of release. Then, on Sept. 8, 2021, Ames’ father, Lawrence Ames, surprised the court by posting bail for his son, according to court documents. 

Two days later, Ames stepped out of county jail with few restrictions. Records show the court did not impose any conditions of release on Ames: He didn’t need to wear an ankle monitor to track his movements, nor was he explicitly barred from drug or alcohol use. He could also hold onto his passport. 

Volkmann, who has since retired from the court, did not respond to requests for comment on his decision to set a lower-than-recommended bail, whether his intention was to keep Ames behind bars, and why the court did not initially place any conditions on Ames’ release.

An unexpected release

Caught off guard, the district attorney’s office scrambled to challenge Ames’ release. On Sept. 13, 2021, three days after Ames walked out of county jail, the district attorney’s office urged the court to return him to custody, arguing that there was “absolutely no question” that Ames committed the killing, and that his release placed the public in “too great of danger.” 

“[We] cannot underscore the dangerousness the defendant poses to the community, his family, and others,” the motion from the district attorney’s office read. “We strongly urge this court to deny bail in this case as there is no least restrictive means and no amount of money that will make the defendant safe or eliminate the risks he poses to the public safety.” 

In a hearing later that week, Superior Court Judge John Salazar agreed, and questioned the judicial wisdom in not denying Ames bail in the first place. Salazar said because “people in the system” believe a high bail will keep someone in custody, setting it at $750,000 represented “an artificial way of saying this is a no-bail case.” 

Salazar went on to say that Ames’ release presented “an obvious risk to the public.” The judge remanded him back into custody. On Sept. 16, 2021, after less than a week of freedom, Ames returned to a jail cell, denied any chance to post bail again. 

Yet, by law, only a “change in circumstances” can allow for such a significant adjustment to the original bail setting. To Ames’ public defender, Stephen Prekoski, nothing about Ames’ case had changed except for the fact that he posted bail. 

So a month later, in October 2021, Prekoski argued in a writ of habeas corpus that Ames was being unlawfully detained. In a March 2022 ruling, Superior Court Judge Syda Cogliati agreed. The district attorney immediately challenged the decision, but the state’s Sixth District Court of Appeals later upheld Cogliati’s ruling. 

By May 13, 2022, less than eight months after he was returned to jail, Ames was back out in the community.

Prosecutors and Cross’ family have consistently argued that the case’s current presiding judge, Stephen Siegel, has offered Ames far too much leeway. 

Despite substance-abuse issues documented in court records, Ames’ conditions of release, filed in May 2022, did not include any prohibition on consumption or possession of alcohol. The court did restrict the use of controlled substances.

Less than two months later, in July 2022, Ames asked Siegel if he could attend a concert at The Midway in San Francisco. Assistant District Attorney Kristal Salcido vehemently objected, largely based on Ames’ drug history. 

Siegel granted the request, requiring Ames to appear back at the courthouse the following day to undergo a drug test. Court records make no mention of whether he passed or failed the test. 

Later that year, in December 2022, probation officers visited Ames’ apartment in San Jose, where he lived alone. (Ames’ bail conditions did not require him to live in Santa Cruz County; court sources say such restrictions are uncommon.) The officers reported that they were “immensely concerned” about Ames’ lifestyle and said they found a mess of alcohol bottles and jugs strewn across his living space. 

“It looks like a recycling center on the floor of his house,” prosecutor Alex Byers told Siegel, according to the transcript from the Dec. 14, 2022, case status update. Byers said Ames had “jugs of liquor that he’s drinking. There’s containers of potentially homebrew or god knows what.”

Byers urged Siegel to remand Ames back into custody. 

“Beyond that report, the probation department is telling you that they cannot safely monitor Mr. Ames under these conditions, or any conditions, because they cannot test him for the substances he was using, or alleged to be using, prior to the offense,” Byers said. “They can’t do it, they can’t keep us safe.” 

At the same hearing, Sara Siegel, a county probation officer (with no familial relationship to the judge) then told the court she agreed “with everything Mr. Byers said.” 

“We are really concerned about what we found in the house and just how similar his lifestyle appears to be as it was before the alleged offense,” Sara Siegel told the judge. That lifestyle included living alone and isolated, drinking and potentially taking drugs that are difficult to test for, such as LSD, MDMA or DMT. She called the alcohol in his apartment “a major concern” and cited a pretrial report in which experts speculated that alcohol withdrawal could have been part of the psychosis during the killing. 

Judge Siegel rejected the district attorney’s effort to return Ames to jail. Instead, he added alcohol restrictions to his bail conditions and ordered Ames into a supervised treatment program. 

Multiple delays

The Cross family has taken particular issue with Siegel’s decision-making on the case.

During a July 2025 case update, Otilia Cross, Hubert’s widow, told Siegel she felt the court’s treatment of Ames was too lenient and increasingly difficult for her family to bear. 

“As if keeping him out of custody, and him using every loophole to postpone his trial has not been enough, there have been several times that you have asked, ‘How are you, Mr. Ames?’ ‘You’re looking well, Mr. Ames,’” Otilia told the judge. “Not once have you asked about Hubert’s children.” 

The loopholes, according to members of the Cross family, include the number of times the trial has been postponed due to attorney changes. Ames has had four attorneys so far, and each time a new one joined, they requested — and were granted — more time to catch up. 

Since the weeks leading up to the first trial date of March 7, 2022, Siegel has allowed six separate postponements. One of these happened last fall, when Ames’ then-attorney, Charles Stevens, was tapped to represent Adrian Gonzalez, the man sentenced as a teenager for the murder and sexual assault of Santa Cruz 8-year-old Madyson Middleton in 2015. Gonzalez was again in front of a jury, which would decide whether he remained in jail or be released. Stevens said the Gonzalez trial would overlap with the Ames case as scheduled. 

At one point, after Siegel delayed the start of the trial in July 2023, the court didn’t come up with a new start date until more than a year later, in late August 2024. The trial would get postponed two more times. 

This past Monday, with an Oct. 20 start date two weeks away, Ames’ attorney, Jamyrson Pittori, filed another motion to postpone the trial to January. Pittori said she wants to prioritize a case she is working on in Santa Clara County: a double homicide from 2021, and the trial is set to begin next Monday, Oct. 13, with witnesses flying in from out of state. Pittori said she is also “managing a family medical issue,” and, separately, cited concerns that she hasn’t yet received the latest psychological reports on Ames. 

In her motion, Pittori also teased that the case might not need a trial at all. She noted that Assistant District Attorney Kristal Salcido planned to object to the postponement, but said Salcido “does agree that this continuance will allow more time for meaningful settlement discussions.” 

‘A slap in the face’ 

Although she was open to it previously, Otilia Cross told Lookout she does not want to see the case settled. She said prior efforts to strike a plea deal fell through, and she wants to see Ames face a jury. 

“I believe the only way he’ll truly face consequences is if we go to trial,” Cross said over email. 

Yet, Cross said there is “a more personal reason” for wanting a trial to proceed. 

“Hubert and I were married for 10 years and had two children together, yet I know so little about how he died,” Cross told Lookout. “I’ve asked for details about his death, but I’ve been told I’ll learn more at the time of trial.” 

Since the day of her husband’s death, Otilia Cross has shown up to every court date. She called Ames being out on bail for years “a slap in the face.” On court days, Cross works to avoid seeing Ames face to face outside of the courtroom “because it is unbearable that I will never see Hubert’s beautiful eyes again, yet I’m forced to see the man who took him from us walking around like a free, innocent man.”

“The worst part is that the justice system is enabling him instead of holding him accountable,” Cross said. “It feels like the only people truly paying the consequences of Hubert’s murder are us — his family, the people who loved him most.”

After appearing at dozens of pretrial court dates and enduring several delays, Cross learned in July that she could address the court, and publicly approached Siegel for the first time, with Ames only feet away.

“This court has somehow allowed that man, who confessed to the murder of his best friend, to walk around free, to live a normal life, and interact with unknowing individuals,” Cross said. “Please, we have waited too long. He has to face the consequences.” 

During Wednesday’s hearing, Cross requested that she still be able to address the court despite the case getting postponed to next week. Expressing frustration that this is the fourth time they’ve been on the “brink of a trial,” she said her family has spent years waiting and have “respected this court” and “honored the system.”  

“Your Honor, we are not just names on a file. We are people whose lives have been devastated,” she said. “All we are asking — pleading — for now, is that this trial finally moves forward. That this man is held accountable. That justice, though long overdue, is finally done.”

– Hillary Ojeda contributed to this report.

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FOR THE RECORD: This story was updated to correct who took Leif Ames to a county behavioral health clinic and to note that Otilia Cross did not take her children to court.
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