Jury Convicts Mother in Girl’s Murder

A Canoga Park woman who twice lost her children after allegations of abuse was convicted Friday of murdering her 19-month-old daughter Marisela during a two-month custody tryout.

A jury of four woman and eight men found that Maria Sabina Barajas received enough counseling after previous allegations of abuse to know that shaking the little girl would hurt her. Last June, Barajas shook Marisela so hard her eyes and brain bled and slammed her against something hard enough to fatally crack her skull.

She was convicted of second-degree murder and assault on a child under 8 causing death.

Barajas, 30, bowed her head as jurors returned to the courtroom. She sat motionless as a Spanish interpreter relayed the jury’s finding; then tears began streaming down her face.

She faces a maximum sentence of 25 years to life in prison.

“I think that she’s just a very sick individual who is incapable of controlling her anger,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Peter Korn said.

He said frustration over misbehavior by the child, including knocking over a fan, ripping apart a videotape and repeatedly getting into the toilet, led Barajas to a fit of rage. It took all of her strength to shake her daughter hard enough to kill her, Korn said.

Barajas first told authorities that the girl fell down a flight of stairs. When confronted with numerous bruises that covered the girl’s body, she said she had “lost patience” with the toddler, slapped and shaken her, Korn said, but still claimed the fatal injury happened after the girl fell.

“My point of view is that it wasn’t a homicide, and there was no intentional act that would cause it to be a homicide,” said Rose Reglos, the public defender who represented Barajas.

She had argued to the jury that Barajas shook the girl to try to revive her after she fell down the stairs and that Barajas did not know shaking the girl was dangerous.

“A lot of it is ignorance,” Reglos said. “She’s a very simple woman.”

But a county coroner testified during the two-week trial that the girl’s injuries had not come from a fall, but from abuse at the hands of an adult.

“If you look at the type of things that she did to try to cover it up, it demonstrates that she was smarter than the defense portrayed her,” Korn said.

When Marisela lost consciousness, Barajas took the toddler to her sister’s house and went to work, refusing to call for help or even come home when her sister called her and told her the girl would not wake up.

It was the child’s father who finally called paramedics when he got home from work hours later and was summoned by his in-laws.

As Marisela was being taken to the hospital, Barajas picked up her 2-week-old daughter--who child welfare workers did not know about--from her sister’s house and hid the infant at her brother’s house, Korn said.

Juror Dave Kovarik, a computer security specialist, said the one sticking issue during the nearly two days of deliberation was whether Barajas indeed knew it was dangerous to shake her child.

“We felt that the counseling that was provided gave her the information that she needed,” Kovarik said.

The Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services first took Barajas’ children in 1992, Korn said, based on allegations that she had abused her then 5-year-old son, Jose. Her children were returned a year later, after she completed parenting classes and counseling.

The children were removed from the home again in 1995, after Barajas’ 14-year-old daughter complained to authorities that her mother hit her. After 2 1/2 years of counseling, Korn said, her two youngest children were returned for a two-month trial. Two weeks shy of completion, Marisela died at her hands.

Sentencing is set for Aug. 4 before Superior Court Judge Kathryne Stoltz.

While second-degree murder sounds like the more serious charge, assault on a child under 8 causing death actually carries the stiffer penalty, 25 years to life. It also has a lesser burden of proof.

Korn said it was important that Barajas was also charged with and convicted of murder, even though it was tougher to prove and had no effect on her sentence, because that’s what she did. The penalty for second-degree murder is 15 years to life.

“The evidence is there,” he said. “It was a murder.”