Death by Fright at Issue in Murder Trial

Sylvia Arizmendi stands accused of scaring someone to death.

In an unusual case scheduled to go to trial today in Pomona Superior Court, Arizmendi faces murder and burglary charges stemming from a residential robbery fraught with fatal blunders.

The victim, Bertha Kavanaugh, was an 86-year-old woman with slightly hardened arteries and a satchel full of $20 bills. The reclusive woman shared a home with her daughter, Marilyn Kavanaugh, 66.

Hidden in their El Monte home was a bag containing $1,500, which was counted every week and dipped into only occasionally to buy groceries, according to Marilyn Kavanaugh’s testimony in the December 1994 preliminary hearings.

The women’s stash was hidden, but not secret. “It was known all over the neighborhood,” said Det. Sgt. Mike Robinson of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

And in that neighborhood, on an empty lot just east of the women’s home, lived a group of drug-addicted vagrants, Robinson said.

Word of the moneybag may have attracted some of the vagrants and served as the motive for a fatal crime.

One November day in 1994, a couple went to the house on the pretext of offering the elder Kavanaugh some clothing. But once inside, they tried to threaten the women into telling them where the satchel was, Deputy Dist. Atty. James Daloisio said.

Police said the threats turned to violence. Marilyn Kavanaugh recalled that a man with “scary brown eyes” pinned her to the floor, hit her and was trying to strangle her with a scarf when she passed out.

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Meanwhile, Arizmendi allegedly led Bertha Kavanaugh to a bathroom and had begun to tie her up with twine when she died.

Bertha Kavanaugh’s death, caused by a stress-induced heart attack, turned the case from a poorly planned home invasion into a complicated murder, prosecutors said.

Arizmendi and Raymond Castro Yanez were arrested and charged with murder and burglary.

If convicted, Arizmendi could face a sentence of 25 years to life, Daloisio said.

Charges against Yanez have been dropped pending the outcome of Arizmendi’s trial.

“I saw nothing in the autopsy which would give me some other reasonable explanation as to why she died when she did other than the fact that the stress from the assault was a contributing factor to the time of her death,” Solomon L. Riley, a deputy Los Angeles County medical examiner, said in his December 1994 testimony.

The murder was most likely accidental, officials say. “I don’t know if they had a plan going in [other than] to rip these elderly women off,” said Robinson, one of the original detectives in the case.

But under the state’s felony murder rule, “if you commit a felony and a death occurs as a direct result of your action, you can be charged with murder in the homicide,” said Michael Brennan, a USC law professor.

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Although not rare, use of the murder rule is usually reserved for cases in which an innocent bystander is shot to death accidentally, either by a suspect or by a police officer pursuing a suspect, Brennan said.

“The facts of this case are unusual,” he said. “It is unusual for someone to have a heart attack because of fear of robbers.”

Felony murder rules have come under attack by some academics who question a person’s culpability in an accidental death, said Loyola University law professor Stan Goldman.

“It’s the only [place] in the law where we’re allowed to transfer criminal intents between crimes,” Goldman said.

“If someone breaks into a house and lights a match to see their way [in the dark], and by accident he sets the drapes on fire and the house burns down, you can’t transfer that intent to commit burglary to an intent to commit arson. Juries look at it and go, ‘It’s a little extreme.’ ”

But the results of coroner’s report, which indicate that the burglars directly caused Bertha Kavanaugh’s heart attack, will make this “a difficult case” for the defense, said Kenneth Wenzl, a public defender representing Arizmendi.

Wenzl declined to discuss the case further. Arizmendi has pleaded not guilty and remains in custody.

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Shortly after the incident, police apprehended Arizmendi, who was hiding in an El Monte apartment and had some of the Kavanaughs’ jewelry, Robinson said. But they still did not know who her partner was.

So she told them.

“She got the costume jewelry, and he got the money,” Robinson said, speculating on the woman’s reason for leading police to Yanez. “It’s not Bonnie and Clyde.”

After a brief car chase through an El Monte neighborhood, police and Yanez’s probation officer caught him and searched the apartment where he was living with relatives, Robinson said.

In a back room, under the mattress of a bassinet, police said they found $1,000 in $20 bills.

Charges against Yanez were dropped at the preliminary hearing because Marilyn Kavanaugh did not identify Yanez as the man who burglarized her home, police said.

Still, prosecutors hope to use Arizmendi’s statements against Yanez in a separate case once her trial is over.