Calculated Carnage

So this gruesome mass murder case--one of the worst California’s ever known--is just about over. Only one more death left to go.

The killing of the killer.

Anybody who murders four children deserves nothing less, the feeling is.

A judge refused Friday to overturn a jury’s recommendation. He agrees with those jurors that this killer needs to be put to death.

He calls the murders “cold, vicious and calculated.”

He scoffs at the notion that the killer wasn’t really responsible for the kids’ deaths. Neither judge nor jury is swayed by the defendant’s regret, by crocodile tears, by mealy- mouthed comments like: “If I could take back time . . . if I could do things better . . . “

Nobody is buying it.

No, death row is where this coldblooded murderer belongs, the judge has ruled.

So that’s the next stop for this taker of lives ages 5, 7, 11 and 12, this convicted slayer of innocent little girls.

Their mother.

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One of the local newspapers keeps referring to her in headlines as “Mom.” As in one of those lurid New York tabloids, in a kind of space-saving shorthand.

Mom Trial Begins.

Mom’s Fate Up to Jury.

Because that was the gut-wrenching part of this story, the idea that these four trusting children could be murdered by Mommy.

That’s what it came down to when Sandi Nieves’ daughters were found on June 30, 1998, after a fire at their home. The fire was no accident. Somebody set it. And only two people got out, the mother and one son.

Then Mom got arrested.

And two summers later, there she was, in a courtroom and in the headlines.

Mom Found Guilty.

Death Urged for Mom.

You could picture prank- playing sons and daughters snipping out these headlines with scissors, attaching them to refrigerator doors with magnets so that their own mom could find them in the morning.

You could even picture the Post-It note stuck to it:

Look, Ma . . . They Got You.

Anything for a laugh.

Most of us build up an immunity to horror. We see so much of it. Murders on a daily basis. Domestic dramas. Husbands hiring hit men to get rid of wives. Infants abandoned in garbage pails.

And death to the culprits? We’ve become inured to this too. Rarely a day goes by now without a comedian making a crack about the governor of Texas’ firsthand familiarity with that state’s executions. They even talk Jimmy Cagney talk. Somebody’s “gonna fry.” Somebody’s “gonna get the needle.”

Or they go off on crazy tangents. A few days ago a fellow named Keith Holliday, the mayor of Greensboro, N.C., said at a city council meeting that any concern over executing an innocent person could be rectified by having death row criminals cryogenically frozen, then reversing the process later if anything exculpatory turns up.

Mayor Holliday may have watched one too many science fiction movies.

Of course, he’s no more out of touch with reality than a Texas inmate who recently attempted to have eyewitness seating to his execution auctioned on eBay.

It’s a bizarre world we inhabit.

Meanwhile, somewhere, opponents of the death penalty sit shaking their heads, exasperated at the cavalier way humans are eager to end the lives of other humans. No doubt wondering why Bible-quoters forever cite “an eye for an eye,” but neglect the passages on “thou shalt not kill” or forgiveness.

It’s so hard to forgive the unforgivable.

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According to the prosecutors and evidence, Sandi Nieves sent “suicide letters” to an ex-husband and ex-boyfriend hours before the fire. Told the kids to sleep slumber-party style in the kitchen. Doused a rug with gasoline. Flicked a cigarette lighter. Left them to die, but got out of the house herself.

She even dialed 911.

“I couldn’t believe it until I read about it on the Internet,” Nieves’ uncle, Sam Wayman of Kennett, Mo., said Friday after learning of the death sentence. “I don’t think she was in the right frame of mind at the time. Her family was the center of her life.”

Mom, now 36, stood in a San Fernando court on Friday, hiding her face with a sheet of paper from a legal pad. Her lawyer said Nieves preferred that her surviving son remember her as she once was, not as she now is.

David Nieves, now 16, testified in May that his mother sealed all the windows and doors before telling the kids camped out in the kitchen to go to sleep.

In other words, Judge L. Jeffrey Wiatt said, this mother “very clearly had in mind that her children would die.”

And next it’s her turn.

Just as soon as Mom’s execution is set.

Unless somebody, somehow, comes to the conclusion in time that all this killing has to stop somewhere.

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Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to: Los Angeles Times, 202 W. 1st St., Los Angeles, CA 90012. E-mail: mike.downey@latimes.com