15-Year-Old Changes Plea to Guilty to Strangling Girl, 7, in Sex Attack

A 15-year-old Newhall boy pleaded guilty Thursday to sexually assaulting and killing a 7-year-old neighbor girl whose body was found stuffed behind his bed three days after she disappeared.

Curtis Cooper changed his plea from not guilty on what was to have been the first day of his trial in Sylmar Juvenile Court for the first-degree murder of Sara Nan Hodges, who was strangled last March.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Michelle Rosenblatt said she will ask the court to impose the maximum sentence when Cooper returns to court Nov. 22. The maximum penalty is 25 years to life in prison, but because he is a juvenile, he would be sent to the California Youth Authority first, where he would be held until he is 25. At that time, Cooper could be transfered to a prison, but Rosenblatt said that was unlikely because he was only 14 at the time he committed the crime.

However, Public Defender Barbara Duey, Cooper’s attorney, said she will seek an alternate facility for the youth. Cooper, she said, needs the type of psychiatric counseling unavailable in the CYA.

“This kid’s got real problems,” she said, adding that Cooper has been “very depressed” since his arrest.

When asked in court Thursday if he understood the charges against him and the consequences of his guilty plea, the slender youth answered softly that he did. His mother, Crystal Cooper, kissed her son on the cheek before the court proceeding began and remained by his side as he admitted his guilt.

Cooper, then 14, moved to Newhall in February from Florida where he had been arrested for a string of petty thefts and burglaries, authorities said. He lived with his mother on Alderbrook Drive five doors away from his victim.

He sometimes went horseback riding with his blonde, blue-eyed victim, authorities said, and was one of the first to volunteer to help search for her after she was reported missing March 23.

“He was the first person here, saying what a nice little girl Sara was and asking if there was anything he could do to help,” said Sara’s 16-year-old sister, Tisha, shortly after her disappearance.

The girl’s decomposing body was found three days later by the boy’s landlady, who made the grisly discovery when trying to locate the source of an odor. The body was stuffed between a bedroom wall and the headboard of the boy’s water bed, authorities said.

He had set up a fan to blow the odor out an open window and had been sleeping in the room before the body was found, investigators said.

Rosenblatt said the girl was strangled in the bedroom with a dog leash as the youth was sexually molesting her. Authorities did not reveal any further motive for the killing.

Four months after Sara’s death, the girl’s father, Walter Scott Mann, 36, of Ojai shot and killed himself, falling dead on his daughter’s grave in Newhall’s Eternal Valley Memorial Park after an all-day vigil. He left a suicide note expressing his love for his daughter.

At the sentencing, Duey said she will show that Cooper has “some sort of brain damage, very mild brain damage.” She said several psychiatrists who have evaluated the youth will testify at the hearing.

Duey added that the brain damage was not severe enough to warrant a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity.

Prosecutor Rosenblatt said she was pleased with the outcome of Thursday’s proceedings.

“We were seeking the maximum and that’s what we got,” she said. “There was no plea bargain.”

The victim’s mother, Linda Hodges, said she hopes that her daughter’s killer can be rehabilitated. She blamed Sara’s death “on the way society treats the mentally ill.”