Nieves Has ‘Flashback’ of Fatal Fire

On trial, accused of using fire to murder her four daughters, Sandi Nieves broke down wailing Monday after testifying that she experienced a “flashback” of holding a lighter in her hand and seeing a blaze.

“I was hoping it would be a dream,” Nieves testified, growing distraught. “It scared the hell out of me. I had a flashback of a flash . . . a lighter . . . a fire . . . I don’t know what it was!”

“I sit here and wonder every day what happened--I have no idea!” Nieves shouted at one point.

Putting Nieves on the stand was part of a risky but calculated strategy by her defense to suggest that she should not be held legally responsible for the 1998 house fire that killed her four daughters.

As part of a psychiatric defense, Deputy Public Defender Howard Waco is trying to show that Nieves was not “legally conscious” when the fire started and should not be held responsible. He is expected to call experts later in the week to testify to that.

Prosecutors contend that Nieves tried to commit suicide and kill her children out of desperation and revenge. She had just had an abortion, a boyfriend had left her, and an ex-husband had tried to escape paying child support, her sole source of income.

Nieves allegedly gathered her children in the kitchen of their rented Saugus house on the night of June 30, 1998, turned on an oven and opened it, then started a fire. Her four daughters, Kristl and Jaqlene Folden, 5 and 7, and Rashel and Nikolet Folden-Nieves, 11 and 12, died of smoke inhalation.

Nieves is charged with four counts of first-degree murder and with the attempted murder of her teenage son, David Nieves, who was also in the house but survived. She is also charged with arson causing great bodily injuries.

If convicted, the 36-year-old woman faces a possible death penalty.

On the stand Monday, Nieves recalled some events with great clarity, and others not at all. She repeatedly said, “I don’t recall.”

In the days before the fire, Nieves was devastated and depressed over an abortion, she said when questioned by Waco.

“It was against everything inside me,” Nieves testified tearfully. The abortion, performed five days before the fire, felt like “the insides of me were ripped out,” she said.

Anxiety and depression over the abortion caused her to take antidepressant drugs, she testified. She was also taking two different prescription diet pills, she said. The night of the fire, she drank beer and wine while talking on the telephone with a friend.

Waco tried to show that until the day of the fire, Nieves was planning for a future, not a suicide.

Days before the fire, Nieves testified, she bought sundresses and sandals, shopped for an expensive dress she was to wear to a friend’s wedding in August, and stocked her refrigerator. She filled her van with gas, and mailed a check for $1,075 to her landlord for the July rent.

But she testified that she had no memory of a letter she wrote to an ex-husband, which appeared to have been mailed hours before the fire.

Prosecutors characterized the letter as a suicide note. “Now you don’t have to support us anymore . . . you scum,” Nieves wrote.

She recalled turning on an oven and opening it four or five inches that night.

“My feet were cold,” she said. But she turned off the oven after David complained about the heat.

Nieves said she remembered looking at her children lovingly as they slept on the kitchen floor. “They’re so peaceful,” she said.

The next thing she recalled, she testified, was “waking up in black smoke.”

Nieves said she told her children to put their faces down into their blankets “so they wouldn’t breathe in smoke.”

The next morning, after the fire had died down, Nieves got up from the kitchen floor, where she had been lying alongside her children, to go outside, she testified.

“So you stepped over the bodies of your children?” asked Deputy Dist. Atty. Beth Silverman.

Nieves responded that she couldn’t remember seeing her daughters on the floor. “I thought they were asleep,” she said.

“I don’t remember stepping over my kids. I don’t remember any of it.”

Silverman asked Nieves to look at photos of her dead daughters and to explain how she could step over them without seeing them.

Nieves refused to consider the pictures.

“I’m not looking at my children if they’re dead,” Nieves said. “I’m not looking at them!”

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge L. Jeffrey Wiatt then told prosecutors to place the photo display directly in front of Nieves.

The woman covered her eyes with her hands, then collapsed, sobbing violently, without looking at the pictures.

Her testimony will continue today.