Concealed Weapons Found on Child Killer in Court

A man convicted of killing and burying his two children was found with seven makeshift knives and a bar of soap containing 17 razor blades under his shirt as he entered a Valley courthouse Friday for a hearing.

Sheriff’s deputies said they don’t know what Marco Barrera, who faces the death penalty, planned to do with the weapons and strips of torn bedsheets tied under his shirt and around his waist.

Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Ronald S. Coen ordered that Barrera’s hands and legs be shackled inside the courtroom. The knives, he said, “looked quite deadly.”

Inmates are searched when they arrive at the courthouse, not when they leave jail by bus for the courthouse.

Barrera, 38, of Pacoima, was in court seeking to delay his sentencing so his attorney could have more time to prepare a motion to set aside the jury’s recommendation of death. The sentencing was rescheduled for Dec. 13.

Last month, a San Fernando jury found that Barrera should be executed for the first-degree murders of 5-year-old Ernesto Esquivel and 2-year-old Guadalupe “Lupita” Esquivel. Their bodies were found buried in Angeles National Forest in 1998.

The same jury convicted Maria Ricardo, the victims’ aunt, of two counts of child abuse and acquitted her on one count of accessory to murder.

The victims and nine of Barrera’s other children lived with him and Ricardo in a converted garage in Pacoima.

Judge Coen Friday said he had “no sympathy” for Ricardo, 31, and sentenced her to the maximum penalty of 12 years and eight months in state prison.

“This case warrants more [prison] time than I will give,” he said, citing the victims’ vulnerability and the defendant’s failure to protect them.

Ricardo’s defense lawyer, Larry Baker, said he had already filed a notice of appeal with the court.

During the hearing, Baker asked the judge for leniency, saying his client never beat the children.

“Her sin was not one of commission, but one of omission,” he said.

Baker described Ricardo as a victim of Barrera’s physical abuse. At trial, he said, Barrera took Ricardo against her will from Mexico when she was 14 and brought her to the United States, where he raped, sodomized and impregnated her.

At the time, Barrera was married--and still is--to Ricardo’s sister, Petra Ricardo, and continued to father children with both women until his arrest in 1998.

“I view this case with a great deal of personal horror,” Baker said. But the evidence “paints a picture of someone who has been through her own hell since 1985.”

That argument went out the window after the first child was killed, Deputy Dist. Atty. Carolyn McNary argued, asking for the maximum sentence.

After Lupita’s death, she said, Ricardo should have acted to save Ernesto.

“There is no excuse for a second child” to be killed, she said.

A Los Angeles County Probation Department report also recommended the maximum sentence.

“This defendant is eligible for parole, but her alarming lack of sensibilities as a human being demands strong sanctions. She has demonstrated she is unfit to live in society,” it stated.

Petra Ricardo, 38, was released from jail last month after serving nearly three years as the result of a plea bargain. She pleaded no contest to child endangerment last summer and agreed to a reduced sentence in exchange for testifying against Barrera and Maria Ricardo.