Stormy Stage Set for Murder Trial

Dr. Xavier Caro said he looked up the stairs at his wife.

He had just come home. They had argued and he had taken a walk to cool off.

But it was clear from the Smith & Wesson .38 in her hands that the fight wasn’t over.

“Ah-hah!” she yelled, not quite aiming the gun at him but brandishing it so he would know it was there.

Xavier Caro grabbed his son Joey, jumped in his car and drove off. When Socorro Caro called him seconds later on his car phone, he made her agree to place their two guns on the ground outside the house, where he could see them.

It was another bad moment in an unhappy marriage. But in a Ventura County courtroom on Thursday, prosecutors used the episode to foreshadow how, a few years later, it would be far, far worse.

“I thought Cora was just being dramatic,” Xavier Caro testified during Socorro Caro’s trial on charges of murdering their three young sons as they slept. “I didn’t think she’d ever use a gun.”

He said the incident occurred one weekend day in 1994 or 1995 in their Santa Rosa Valley home.

On the night of Nov. 22, 1999, the young Caro brothers, ages 5 to 11, were shot in their beds. A fourth son, who at the time was 13 months old, was unharmed and now lives with his father.

In his first day of testimony, Xavier Caro gave precise answers to questions posed by Deputy Dist. Atty. Cheryl Temple.

But he choked back tears as he recounted the names and birth dates of his three slain sons. Except when directed by Temple, he rarely looked at the pale, dark-haired woman sitting 30 feet away.

Socorro Caro has pleaded not guilty, with an amended plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. One of her attorneys says her husband framed her. Her defense team also has suggested that the near-fatal gunshot wound to the brain she suffered that night was not self-inflicted.

On the witness stand, Xavier Caro said that he and his wife both owned guns, which were kept loaded in a strongbox in their walk-in closet. He had arranged private lessons for them on the use of handguns for personal protection, and even had the trigger of his wife’s gun altered to suit her.

“The edges were rounded and softened so it wouldn’t hurt as much when you pulled the trigger,” he said.

Under questioning from Temple on Thursday, Caro cast himself as devoted beyond all else to his children. He also painted a picture of a marriage that was hopelessly difficult.

The couple met in 1980, when she came to work at his medical office in Northridge. The previous year, Xavier Caro had started his private practice in rheumatology.

In 1994, the family moved from Granada Hills to their five-bedroom hilltop “castle house” near Camarillo--so named for little Joey’s exclamation the first time he saw it.

But despite their lavish home and his successful practice, the couple argued--even in front of his office staff. In August 1999, Xavier Caro consulted a divorce attorney. When his wife found the attorney’s card and a work sheet listing the couple’s assets, he testified, she confronted him.

By then, money had become a source of intense friction. Xavier Caro testified that he received numerous collection letters and an eviction notice for more than $44,000 in past-due office rent. Thumbing through stacks of checks presented as evidence, he said he discovered that his wife had diverted more than $105,000 to her parents, who lived rent-free in the Granada Hills home he had purchased when he was single.

“I took check-writing privileges away from Cora, confiscated her credit cards, and asked her not to return as office manager,” Xavier Caro said.

At about the same time, he testified, he started an affair with a technician in his office.

“She made me feel good about myself again,” he said.

His court appearance Thursday was cut short by testimony from the neurosurgeon who operated on Socorro Caro at Los Robles Regional Medical Center after the shootings. Lawyers for both sides allowed the interruption because Dr. Donald Pryor had told them he would be unavailable for much of September.

Pryor said Socorro Caro’s injury was consistent with a self-inflicted wound, bolstering prosecutors’ assertions that she tried to kill herself after killing her children.

But he also fueled the defense’s contention that she has no memory of that night. He said brain injuries like the one she suffered can cause amnesia.