Man Gets 15 to Life in Girlfriend’s Death

A 55-year-old homeless man was sentenced Wednesday to 15 years to life in prison for strangling his girlfriend and leaving her battered body on the steps of a Ventura elementary school.

While handing down the sentence, Superior Court Judge Vincent J. O’Neill Jr. told defendant Jose Garcia that he wished he could wipe out any possibility of parole given the long line of women Garcia has beaten over the last 30 years.

“That’s not my job, though,” the judge said. “It’s up to the board of prison terms.”

With two years’ credit for the time he has spent in county jail, and a state policy that severe offenders serve 85% of the minimum term before becoming eligible for parole, Garcia could stand before a parole board in 10 or 11 years.

But Deputy Dist. Atty. Ron Bamieh said he doubted any board would release Garcia given his extensive history of violence against women.

“You have eight other women who were choked by this guy,” Bamieh said. “It’s not going to happen. . . . We don’t parole murderers in California.”

A jury found Garcia guilty of second-degree murder last month, rejecting the defendant’s claims that he slept at a friend’s apartment when girlfriend Marsha Ann Lane was strangled on the steps of Lincoln Elementary School on Feb. 18, 1997.

A teacher found the 43-year-old woman’s body the next morning before classes began. Lane was also a transient who had been living on the streets of Ventura with Garcia.

During six interviews with police, Garcia maintained that he didn’t kill Lane. He told authorities that the couple did get into a fight at the school, but he said he walked away from the argument and slept on a friend’s couch on nearby Ann Street.

On Wednesday, Garcia, who was born in Oxnard and worked briefly in local packinghouses during the 1970s, said nothing in his defense and offered no statements of remorse or sorrow for Lane’s death.

Dressed in blue jail clothes, the stocky gray-haired defendant shook his public defender’s hand after the hearing concluded, then walked to a nearby holding cell.

One of Garcia’s former girlfriends was watching from behind a door in the back of the courtroom, too afraid, she said, to let Garcia see her.

Now a local businesswoman with a family, she asked not to be identified.

“I have a beautiful family to protect,” she said.

Standing outside the courtroom with Bamieh, an investigator and a victim advocate, the woman said she came to the hearing to represent the other wives and girlfriends Garcia hurt.

According to court testimony, Garcia choked several girlfriends to the point of unconsciousness. He stabbed one in the back with a steak knife, and knocked another unconscious with a baseball bat. None of the cases were prosecuted.

The woman who showed up at court dated Garcia decades ago when she was just a teenager. She was among those who testified during the trial about suffering beatings and psychological abuse at Garcia’s hands.

She said she was disappointed he didn’t receive a longer sentence for Lane’s murder, and vowed to tell a parole board Garcia should never be released from custody.

“I made up my mind,” she said, “I will be there.”