Friends Try to Spare Nieves From Death Penalty

Friends and a former church leader testified Wednesday on behalf of a woman facing the death penalty for murdering her four daughters, saying she was known as a good mother.

Two women who knew Nieves so admired her parental skills that they considered her a role model. “I always looked up to her in raising my children,” said Shirley Driskell, Nieves’ friend since childhood. Driskell recalled trips to parks, the zoo and theaters with Nieves and her children.

The testimony in San Fernando Superior Court during the penalty phase of the trial was a bid to save the life of Nieves, 36. She was convicted a week ago of the first-degree murders of her four daughters.

In the early morning hours of July 1, 1998, an angry and distraught Nieves tried to commit suicide and take her children with her, prosecutors said. She mailed “suicide letters” to the men who she believed had mistreated her, told her five children all to sleep in the kitchen, then started a fire there.

Jaqlene and Kristl Folden, 5 and 7, and Rashel and Nikolet Folden-Nieves, 11 and 12, died of smoke inhalation. The mother was also convicted of arson and the attempted murder of her son, David Nieves, who was 14 at the time and survived.

Deputy Public Defender Howard Waco had argued unsuccessfully that Nieves was legally unconscious at the time of the blaze.

On Wednesday, Tammy Pearce, who has known Nieves for about 10 years, recalled how Nieves and her children always sat in the front pew in church. “The children were always beautifully groomed,” she said.

Pearce, a mother of 11, said Nieves, who served as a Cub Scout committee chairwoman, was a “very good example to me as to how to be a good mother.”

But when questioned by Deputy Dist. Atty. Kenneth Barshop, Pearce said she and Nieves hadn’t attended church together since 1993, when Pearce moved away.

“Does a good, caring loving mother not allow their kids to go outside to save themselves during a fire?” Barshop asked. Trial testimony established that during the fire, her children woke up gagging from the smoke, but Nieves ordered them to stay inside.

“Not if she wasn’t in her right mind,” Pearce replied.

Also vouching for Nieves was the former bishop of the Perris ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which Nieves and her children attended before moving to Santa Clarita.

Nieves’ children were always neat, clean, polite and well-mannered, said Lynn Jones, the former bishop.

Driskell said she had such trust in Nieves that in her will she asked that Nieves raise her two children.

Nieves’ children, Driskell said, “were everything in Sandi’s life.”