Conviction overturned in 2012 kidnapping and killing of Sierra LaMar
Court rules that merging separate attempted kidnapping allegations with murder trial prejudiced jury against Antolin Garcia Torres, who is serving a life sentence for disappearance of 15-year-old Morgan Hill girl
by Robert Salonga · The Mercury NewsGetting your Trinity Audio player ready...
SAN JOSE — An appellate court on Friday overturned the murder conviction of Antolin Garcia Torres, the man serving life without parole in the 2012 disappearance of 15-year-old Sierra LaMar, a crime that captivated the region in part because her body has never been found.
Garcia Torres, 34, persuaded a three-judge panel of the 6th District Court of Appeal that the trial court erred by allowing three attempted kidnapping allegations from 2009 — three years before Sierra’s disappearance from a bus stop in unincorporated Morgan Hill — to be tried alongside the murder charge. The appellate court found that consolidating the cases prejudiced the jury.
Sierra’s family could not immediately be reached Friday afternoon. But Midsi Sanchez, 33, who was kidnapped on her way home from school in Vallejo when she was 8 and later became an advocate for Sierra’s family during the search, said she was “blown away” by the ruling.
“I think about her family, because if this man gets to walk free, now they have to deal with the torment of him being out in the public — and not just that family, but everybody that was involved,” said Sanchez, whose abductor, Curtis Dean Anderson, died in prison eight years after his conviction. “Sierra LaMar’s case was a national case, and there’s going to be a strike of fear in the community and the surrounding communities.”
The appellate ruling was released Friday. The Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office has the option to ask the California Supreme Court to review the decision. If that effort fails, prosecutors could seek to retry Garcia Torres on the murder charge, but they would not be allowed to rely on the prior kidnapping allegations or theories of willful, deliberate and premeditated murder, according to the ruling.
“In any retrial … based on our finding of insufficient evidence of willful, deliberate, and premeditated murder or a specific intent to kill, the prosecution is barred from relying on those theories,” wrote acting Presiding Justice Adrienne Grover.
Garcia Torres is serving a life-without-parole sentence at Corcoran State Prison and is expected to remain there while prosecutors decide whether to seek further review or pursue a retrial. His appellate attorney, Danalynn Pritz, could not immediately be reached for comment Friday afternoon.
In response to an inquiry from this news organization, the district attorney’s office said it was reviewing the opinion.
“We just received the opinion and are digesting it,” the statement reads. “However, we will never stop seeking justice for Sierra.”
Sierra disappeared on her way to a bus stop near her home March 16, 2012. Her body has never been found, even after more than 750 volunteers conducted repeated searches for her remains.
At the 2017 trial, prosecutors relied heavily on DNA evidence they said linked Garcia Torres to Sierra, including traces found in his car, a strand of hair discovered on a piece of rope in the trunk and his DNA found on Sierra’s pants, which were recovered in a field.
Garcia Torres denied ever meeting Sierra and initially said he had been on a short fishing trip the morning she disappeared. After being confronted with DNA evidence, he said he periodically masturbated in his car and discarded tissues and napkins out the window. His defense also suggested the possibility that Sierra had run away from home.
In the ruling, Grover wrote that while the three prior attempted kidnapping counts — in which Garcia Torres was accused of forcing his way into the cars of three women in Safeway parking lots in Morgan Hill over a one-week span — could have supported guilty verdicts on their own, they should have been severed from the murder case.
“The charged murder bore much less resemblance to the three Safeway incidents which took place three years earlier,” Grover wrote.
She also pointed to weaknesses in the murder case that, in the court’s view, may have taken on greater weight because of the combined charges.
“None of the four charges was particularly strong … Sierra’s body was not found, raising a question as to the fact of her death, and no evidence clearly established how she died or how defendant had caused her death,” Grover wrote.
She added that “the prosecutor’s arguments at trial which encouraged the jury to consider the evidence cumulatively also contribute to our finding of prejudice,” concluding that “the improper cross-admission of the charges constitute prejudicial errors requiring reversal.”
Sanchez, who now has three children, said her heart goes out to Sierra’s family during “this chaos.”
“My prayer for them is that they would have peace and not be in fear,” she added.
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