Defendant’s, Victims’ Fathers Trade Threats : Grocer Sentenced in Guarded Court for Slayings

With extra sheriff’s deputies called in after threats of violence in a San Fernando courtroom, a 30-year-old Santa Clarita Valley man was sentenced Wednesday to 32 years to life in prison for shooting his wife and sister-in-law to death during an argument over his demand to see his young son.

Jesus Martinez Sanchez sat with head bowed and eyes closed as Superior Court Judge Edward Gorman read the sentence. Behind him, in the gallery, 13 of his relatives sobbed so loudly that sheriff’s deputies ushered them out of the courtroom. The victims’ parents and several other relatives listened silently from the opposite side of the gallery.

The murder case involved a brain-damaged defendant who had a history of mental breakdowns and claimed that he was in seizure at the time of the killings and did not recall shooting his wife or her sister.

Nevertheless, Sanchez, an illegal alien, pleaded guilty last September to two counts of second-degree murder. Despite arguments for a light sentence because of his ailment, Sanchez was given the maximum sentence with a recommendation from Gorman that he serve the time in a mental health facility. By law, Sanchez will be eligible for parole in 16 years.

Two sheriff’s deputies stood at the back of the courtroom as Gorman pronounced sentence. Earlier in the day, during testimony by relatives of the victims and the defendant, the fathers of both families traded threats across the courtroom.

The victims’ father, standing before the judge, warned that if justice were not served in the courtroom, the murders would spark a war between the families, who live in several Santa Clarita Valley communities.

“I was deprived of two daughters for the rest of my life. My grandchildren are not going to know their mothers,” Jesus Lopez told Gorman. “I want this man to be punished with 200 years in jail so that when my grandchildren grow up they will know justice is served.”

Sanchez told Gorman quietly through an interpreter, “I am willing to pay for what has happened. Please, forgive me.”

According to court records, Sanchez told a county probation officer that he does recall telephoning his 27-year-old common-law wife, Maria Estella Lopez, on the day of the murder, June 7, 1983, and telling her he wanted to visit her Saugus home to see their 3-year-old son, Jesus Jr.

The couple had separated two weeks before, Sanchez said, and Lopez told him not to come, said the boy was dead and hung up. Sanchez said he left his Val Verde grocery store and drove to Saugus with a Colt .38-caliber pistol.

At Lopez’s home, Sanchez recalled, he argued with Lopez and her 23-year-old sister, Catalina. Sanchez testified that he remembers no more about what happened at the house.

Police say Sanchez, angered because Lopez would not let him see their son, shot and killed Lopez and her sister, then walked to the back porch and fired three times at another sister, 20-year-old Raquel, hitting her twice. Police said Sanchez was aiming his pistol at a neighbor who was visiting Raquel when he heard his son crying upstairs.

Called Sheriff’s Department

Police said the neighbor told them Sanchez then dropped the pistol, ran back into the house and emerged carrying his son under one arm and a holding a flower. He hitchhiked back to his store, Sanchez Market, and called the Sheriff’s Department to say he had killed his wife.

“I don’t remember shooting them or pulling out a gun,” Sanchez told state psychiatrists during a pre-sentencing evaluation. “I remember calling the sheriff, but it seems more like a dream now. I wake up at night wondering what’s going on, what is the truth and what is not.”

Sanchez was originally charged with first-degree murder. Because the crime involved a multiple murder with a firearm, it carried a maximum sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole. Those charges were reduced to second-degree murder after the district attorney’s office decided that Sanchez’s medical condition would make it difficult to convince a jury that the crimes were premeditated, a criterion for first-degree murder.

Arguing for a minimum sentence of 15 years to life, defense attorney George Davis on Wednesday called as a witness Sanchez’s neurological surgeon, who testified that Sanchez had slipped and fallen on his head in 1975 and required four surgeries after a blood-filled tumor formed on his brain.

Dr. Maurice Silver testified that, ever since the accident, Sanchez has suffered “psychomotor seizures” during which he acts without knowing what he is doing. Silver said it is possible Sanchez was in such a seizure during the shootings.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Lucienne Coleman responded by producing a state psychiatric report that quoted Sanchez telling the doctors: “I killed my wife because she wouldn’t let me see my kid. . . . I’ll get out of here soon because of my head injury.”

In rendering the maximum sentence, Gorman said the horror of the murders and the premeditation he believed was involved outweighed arguments for a lighter sentence because of Sanchez’s medical condition. Gorman added that he wished he could sentence Sanchez to even more prison time.

“I think Mr. Sanchez got a break when the charges were reduced,” he said. “I cannot even think about this tragic event without wanting to cry.”