Mother Killed 4 Children to Spite Men, Prosecutor Says

Despite her efforts to paint herself as a victim, Sandi Nieves is really a liar and a manipulator who killed her four daughters because she wanted vengeance against men who failed her, a prosecutor said Thursday in court.

“What type of mother does that?” Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. Kenneth Barshop said in closing arguments before Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge L. Jeffrey Wiatt. Barshop urged the San Fernando jury to find Nieves guilty of first-degree murder.

Nieves, 36, allegedly gathered her five children in the kitchen-den area of their Saugus house on the night of June 30, 1998, and started a fire. Kristl and Jaqlene Folden, 5 and 7, and Rashel and Nikolet Folden-Nieves, 11 and 12, died of smoke inhalation. Her son, David Nieves, who was 14 at the time, was also in the house but survived.

Nieves is charged with four counts of first-degree murder, attempted murder and arson. If convicted, she could face the death penalty. Closing arguments by the defense are scheduled to begin Monday.

Throughout the trial, which began three months ago, Nieves’ lawyer proposed different, sometimes conflicting theories of why she should be acquitted. He asserted a lack of proof that she started the fire; that even if she had started the fire, she was in a state resembling sleepwalking state at the time and legally unconscious; or that someone else, perhaps her son, David, started the fire.

“Does the defense have no shame?” said Barshop, calling the theories of Deputy Public Defender Howard Waco “smoke and mirrors.”

Barshop painted Nieves as a woman with two failed marriages and a boyfriend who had rejected her. With no prospect of a paying job and her money running out fast, Nieves was angered by an ex-husband’s attempt to reverse his adoption of three of her children, which would have reduced child-support payments, the prosecutor asserted.

Just hours before the fire, Nieves wrote and mailed three letters, which Barshop characterized as suicide letters.

In a letter to Scott Volk, the boyfriend who left her and whose baby she had aborted just five days earlier, Nieves wrote: “I’m sorry if my love wasn’t good enough for you. . . . You just couldn’t see it. Now you never will. . . . I can’t live without you in my life,” Barshop read aloud in court.

In a letter mailed to David Folden, the ex-husband who tried to reverse his adoption of the three eldest children, Nieves wrote: “Now you don’t have to support any of us anymore. . . . You are scum.”

Barshop argued that the letter indicated Nieves’ intent to die. Folden’s legal action would not have affected his support payment for the two younger children.

When one of the girls woke up in the smoke and asked to go to the bathroom to throw up, Nieves told her to stay where she was and throw up on the floor, Barshop said.

Several times Barshop displayed photos of the dead girls. A few showed the corpses lying stiffly, on the kitchen floor. Jurors squirmed uneasily, and one turned away.

“Why did she kill the children?” Barshop said. “She sure hated the fathers. She sure wanted them to pay.”