For Juror, Child Puts a Verdict Into Focus

Over lunch, she saw a toddler in a car seat.

It was a moment unremarkable in every respect--but it was enough to tilt a juror toward recommending that Socorro Caro be executed for killing three of her young sons.

The juror, who asked not to be identified, said she was among several on the panel who were not set on choosing the death penalty at the outset of deliberations Friday. By late Monday morning, she was the only one not convinced that justice would be best served with a lethal injection.

“I was in tears in the jury room,” the juror told The Times. “I cried and cried and cried.”

The 10 women and two men on the Ventura County jury recommended death for Caro on Monday.

On Tuesday, the most reluctant of the jurors recounted her change of heart.

Trying to weigh the lawyers’ aggravating and mitigating factors left her unclear, she said. There was no evidence that Caro, 44, had plotted the killings, she thought. On the other hand, it bothered her that Caro never confessed, saying she couldn’t remember the night’s tragic events.

Until the juror spotted the child in the car seat, she was torn. But her path soon became clear.

The boy reminded her of Caro’s surviving son Gabriel, who is now 3 years old. Gabriel wasn’t harmed in the attack, but, for this juror, glimpsing a little boy about his age crystallized the enormity of Caro’s crimes.

“It really hit me: She’s ruined this kid’s life,” the juror said. “She killed his three brothers. And knowing that he was supposed to be next. . . . Well, he’s still alive and has to live with that for the rest of his life.”

Caro’s .38-caliber revolver was down to one bullet after she shot her three older boys as they slept. That is when she turned the gun on herself. Gabriel lay in a crib a few feet from where she fell.

Caro’s attorneys had cast her as a loving mother who snapped under the strain of depression, alcohol and a crumbling marriage. But jurors reached on Tuesday said they couldn’t understand her need to kill.

“She wasn’t the first woman whose husband had an affair on her and she won’t be the last,” said one juror. “Other people drink and they never kill anybody. Other people are depressed and they never kill anybody.”

Like Caro at the time of the slayings, Leslie Nicholas is a 42-year-old stay-at-home mother of four who volunteers in her kids’ classrooms. The Simi Valley resident describes herself as “the ultimate soccer mom.”

Nicholas could find nothing about Caro to temper the brutality of her crimes.

“What can outweigh three dead children?” she asked. “In my personal deliberation process, I couldn’t come up with anything more compelling than that.”

A defense psychiatrist testified that Caro primarily wanted to kill herself, but killed her sons to protect them from life without her. Nicholas said she didn’t believe that explanation.

“My personal opinion is that those boys were shot out of anger, not out of love,” she said.

For some jurors, that point was underscored by images presented during the trial of the three dead boys in their bloodstained beds.

“You just kept those three boys in mind,” said Nancy Whitt, a medical transcriptionist who recently left her job as a secretary for the county’s probation department. “They didn’t do this to themselves. Someone should pay for that, and my job was to be there for them.”

The defense effort to pin the boys’ deaths on Caro’s physician husband was unconvincing, but the jurors said they didn’t blame the attorneys for trying.

“The defense team did an excellent job,” said Roberta Stein, a school bus driver in Ojai. “They worked with what they had--but they didn’t have anything to work with. I felt sorry for them; they were grasping at nothing.”

During the five days it took to decide Caro’s guilt last month, tempers flared, the jurors said. One man, who was booted off the panel for discussing the case outside the jury room, insisted on raising scenarios that hadn’t been presented in court, a juror said.

“He was just going on speculation, and you can’t do that,” she said. “With him, it wasn’t about the evidence. It was: ‘What if, what if, what if . . . ?’ ”

Six hours after he was replaced by an alternate, Caro was convicted.

The jurors were picked from hundreds of prospects in mid-July. Their job ended at about 2 p.m. Monday, when Superior Court Judge Donald D. Coleman told them they finally could read accounts of the case and talk about it with anyone.

“I don’t know any of us who didn’t gain weight,” one juror said, explaining that homemade cookies provided by the group were seldom out of reach. “Eating was our outlet.”