Hearts of Many Are Touched by Death of Girl They Didn’t Know

People shaken by a violent death came to St. Martha’s Catholic Church in La Puente on Monday to pray for a little girl whose face they had never seen.

Twenty West Covina police officers acted as pallbearers, since none of 2-year-old Yahaira Jessica Aispuro’s family was there. They carried the small pink casket to the front of the sanctuary during the memorial Mass as children from St. Martha’s School sang hymns.

None of the 150 mourners knew Jessica. And even on the 2600 block of Pauline Street in West Covina where the child lived with her mother and her mother’s boyfriend, most people didn’t know her name.

Last week, they learned it in news stories reporting that the brown-eyed little girl with the pixie haircut was dead.

Her mother, Martha Araceli Aispuro, 25, is in custody, charged with being an accessory after the fact to murder, rape, sodomy and child molestation. Her boyfriend, Hector Ubaldo Soto, 22, is being held in Los Angeles County Jail on murder, child abuse, sodomy and child molestation charges. He could face the death penalty if he is convicted.

Strangers came to the funeral and momentarily became a community--hugging each other, wondering. The child’s natural father and aunt, the only other relatives authorities know of, are in Mexico.

Jessica, who had come to California with her mother a year ago, will be flown to her birthplace in Sinaloa today at the request of her aunt, Juana Aispuro. Her father, Armando de la Vega, 26, was contacted Friday by the county Department of Children’s Services and notified of his daughter’s death.

“She was violated by those who were to love her and care for her,” said Father William Leser in his eulogy. “We know all the pain has ended, and she has now been called to live in the peace of our Father.”

Leser also reminded the congregation that Jessica’s death, which authorities believe occurred after her mother was also beaten by Ubaldo Soto, is a warning to victims of abuse to tell someone before it’s too late.

“This must teach women not to take abuse, never to allow boyfriends to hit them, to hurt them--and then say it’s because he loves her,” Leser said.

As the priest waved a censer over Jessica’s casket, a quartet sang a song police officers composed in memory of abused children.

After the service, seventh-graders at Edgewood High School in West Covina presented Leser with an $88.64 check to help with funeral expenses and to go to child abuse prevention programs.

Outside St. Martha’s, Maria Patterson, 42, of La Puente couldn’t hold back her tears as she told of calling the funeral home to ask how she could make a donation. She found out that Jessica had no burial clothes.

Said Patterson: “I bought her a little pink dress and wrote her a poem.”