The Fight Against Crime: Notes From The Front : Witness’s Pain Leaves Lasting Mark on Juror

Maria Pedroza wasn’t there on the bright June afternoon when Mario Antonio Violante stabbed Martha Vasquez to death. She wasn’t there to see the terror in the eyes of Vasquez’s 11-year-old daughter, Jesselyn Monge, as the little girl looked on, paralyzed by fear in the borrowed car where the attack took place.

But Pedroza cannot forget that day. She sees the events as clearly as if Jesselyn’s eyes were her own. She dreams of Violante at night.

And now that he has been convicted of first degree murder, Pedroza, who served on the jury that convicted him, keeps going over the events in her mind, sure one minute that the panel did the right thing in finding Violante guilty, but worried the next that the kind of decisions that can put someone away for the rest of his life are better made by God than a 25-year-old health care worker.

The odd ties that bind jurors not only to their cases but to each other pulled even tighter in the hours after Violante was found guilty. Just 15 minutes after the verdict was delivered Friday, foreman Dale Correll, 69, collapsed outside the courthouse.

Taken to Northridge Hospital Medical Center’s Sherman Way facility, he was in stable condition Tuesday.

The trial has changed Pedroza forever, she says. The opening arguments were not gripping, but then Jesselyn began to testify about seeing her mother slain.

“I wanted to cry,” Pedroza said. “Jesselyn didn’t have any expression on her face. She was just blank.” Why didn’t the girl break down? Why didn’t she cry?

When Pedroza got home that night, she faced a block on her own emotions: Under court order not to talk to anyone about the case, she had to keep it all in--just, she imagined, like Jesselyn.

The next day brought testimony from Violante. Pedroza was eager to hear it. Surely, there was a reason for such a vile and violent act. Surely Violante would explain.

Here’s what he said: Martha Vasquez was always asking for money, trying to blackmail him. That’s why he beat and cut her in February and stabbed her to death in June.

The jury deliberated for a day and decided to sleep on it. They were torn between two degrees of murder, with Pedroza and one other holding out for second degree.

“I wanted to believe that he had snapped,” she said, but at last became convinced that “he wanted to kill her. He wanted to hurt her. So we took a vote again. This time it was unanimous.”

After the jury reached its decision, Pedroza began to cry. Another juror cried too. They went down to sign out. That’s when Correll collapsed, she said.

“O my God,” everybody was saying, “it’s Dale.” Pedroza went down to the hospital. There were other jurors there and even members of the murdered woman’s family. The jurors asked after Jesselyn. She had seen enough tragedy, said her sister, and was home resting.

Pedroza gave her phone number to a couple of her fellow jurors.

Now, she says, she wants to forget the whole thing.

But she knows she won’t forget. “I’m a different person,” she said. “Even though I was not there, I experienced something awful. What happened to the family--it’s as if it happened to me.”

Emotionally, she never wants to serve on another jury. But she also still believes in the jury system.

“I just feel that this is how you can get a fair verdict,” Pedroza said.

So if they call her up again, she says, she’ll go.