Rapist Brought On Elderly Woman’s Death, Jury Is Told : Trial: Prosecutor says she lost the will to live. He urges that the defendant be convicted of murder.

The testimony of six doctors suggests that the rape of a 79-year-old Stanton woman sapped her will to live and eventually contributed to her death a month after the attack, a prosecutor told a jury Wednesday.

Deputy Dist. Atty. David R. LaBahn urged jurors to find the admitted rapist guilty of murder for killing Mary Ward’s spirit.

“These terribly atrocious acts led to her death. There is a direct causal link between this man’s actions and her death,” LaBahn said.

The prosecutor made his comments during closing arguments in the monthlong murder trial of Jose Alonso Garcia, 20, a dishwasher from Stanton.

Before the 1992 attack, Ward was a “feisty and energetic” woman who helped manage an apartment building, LaBahn said. Afterward, she became withdrawn and despondent and “lost her desire to live,” he said.

Garcia has admitted raping Ward but is fighting the murder charge and four other sexual assault charges. If convicted of murder, he faces life in prison without parole.

His attorney, Deputy Public Defender Leonard Gumlia, is scheduled to make closing arguments in the case today.

Gumlia has previously blasted the prosecution’s murder theory in the case as “voodoo.” He said that the sexual assault did not cause Ward’s death and that she was ill with lung cancer and other medical problems.

When Ward died in June, 1992, a coroner’s investigator determined the causes of death as congestive heart failure and pneumonia, and an autopsy showed that a ravenous form of lung cancer had taken hold in Ward’s body.

On Wednesday, LaBahn said that Ward’s ailments--which included kidney, heart and lung problems--were serious but that she had been improving, according to her friends and family, and would certainly have lived beyond June, 1992.

He cited the physicians, psychologists and psychiatrists who testified for the prosecution during the trial.

LaBahn said their testimony clearly showed a connection between the mind and the body, and when a person “loses interest in living, especially with the elderly,” that person often dies sooner than a person with a more positive outlook on life.