Caro Jury Told of ‘Chilling’ Talk

Something about his wife’s words scared Dr. Xavier Caro.

Suddenly she was no longer agitated, no more the aggrieved wife railing against her husband’s insensitivity. Now Socorro Caro was--as her husband later put it--”machine-like.”

“That’s the thing I’ve always admired about you, X,” she told him in a phone call from the couple’s Santa Rosa Valley home to his Northridge office. “You’ve always known the difference between right and wrong.”

As soon as Xavier Caro--his wife always called him “X”--heard that, he knew it was time to go home. Earlier in the evening, he had left after an argument. He had ignored all her earlier calls to his medical office. But now a vague dread was calling him back.

“There was just something about Cora,” he testified in a Ventura County courtroom Friday. “The way she spoke--it was just chilling. I thought I should go home.”

The grim reality in the Caros’ home was far more chilling than Xavier Caro’s vague hunch that something was wrong. Three of the Caros’ four young boys were shot dead in their beds. Socorro Caro, who was known to friends as Cora, lay on her bedroom floor with a life-threatening gunshot wound to the brain.

Charged with three counts of first-degree murder, she has pleaded not guilty, later amending her plea with one of not guilty by reason of insanity.

On the witness stand Friday, Xavier Caro led jurors on a step-by-step journey through that anguished night. At moments, his voice broke and he wept. After each loss of emotional control, he rapidly composed himself, framing answers to attorneys’ questions with clinical precision.

A key witness for the prosecution, Xavier Caro testified earlier this week about his rocky 13-year marriage. His court appearance has been watched closely because his wife’s attorneys say he framed their client for the deaths of the Caro boys, who were aged 5 to 11.

On Friday, all 56 seats in Judge Donald D. Coleman’s courtroom were filled as the physician offered his account of the tragedy on Nov. 22, 1999, behind the iron gates of the five-bedroom hilltop home near Camarillo.

That night, he and his wife had their first fight in a couple of months, Xavier Caro testified. She had been taking Prozac, and both thought the antidepressant had improved her mood and helped calm their troubled relationship.

Just that evening, he said, they had a pleasant dinner with their children and Cora’s mother, Juanita Leon. But that is also when 11-year-old Joey made a remark about the margaritas his parents were sipping.

“He said something like, ‘You have to have your little drink,’ ” testified Xavier Caro, who said he took offense at the remark.

“I just didn’t like the tone,” he said.

He stewed over it for a while, but his wife thought he was overreacting. Soon, he said, she was yelling that he didn’t love her. When he tried to leave for his office to cool down, she grabbed his shoulders from behind and ended up on the floor with her hands around his ankles, he said. Alarmed by the noise, Juanita Leon yelled at him: “Get out, you brute!” he testified.

At his office, Xavier Caro didn’t pick up his wife’s repeated calls--until the one that brought him home.

The house was lit but it was very quiet, he told the jury of nine women and three men.

In the bedroom, Socorro Caro was on the floor, moaning, with a bloody froth around her mouth. Figuring she might have overdosed, Xavier Caro called 911 immediately.

“To better ascertain what was going on, I rolled her over,” he said.

That’s when he found her Smith & Wesson .38, as well as several shells. “I just became very confused,” he testified. “It just did not compute. I was puzzled, perplexed, bewildered. I just did not have coherent thoughts, per se.” Relating how he discovered Joey’s body in the next room, Xavier Caro tried to choke back the rising grief in his voice.

“I saw Joey,” he said. “I saw my Joey. I saw my Joey . . . his eyes were open, his mouth was open. He was so pale, he had so much blood around him . . . “

He said he felt for a pulse in his son’s neck--without success.

Michael, 8, and Chris, 5, were lying together in the lower level of their bunk bed.

“Mikey started breathing,” Xavier Caro said, crying. “He had agonal respirations--deep, gasping breaths.”

Xavier Caro knelt by his son’s bed, pinched the boy’s nose, and breathed into his mouth twice. Cupping his hand under the boy’s head, he hoped to move him to the floor for CPR.

“But the back of his head came off in my hand,” he said. “I saw the sutures. I knew exactly what it was. My baby’s skull in my hand . . . “ Socorro Caro’s lead attorney, Assistant Public Defender Jean Farley, cross-examined Xavier Caro for about two hours Friday, but did not focus directly on the boys’ deaths. Her cross-examination is to continue Tuesday.

Instead, she addressed several issues she had hinted at in her opening statement last week.

They included the length of time it takes to drive from Xavier Caro’s Northridge office to the Caro home. That time span is important because the defense contends Xavier Caro arrived home 30 minutes before placing his 911 call.

Farley also asked questions suggesting Socorro Caro was unlikely to use a gun. She didn’t particularly want to learn about their use, acknowledged Xavier Caro, who said he set up private lessons with a handgun specialist so the couple could be more secure at home.

Finally, she learned from Xavier Caro that the family’s grandfather clock could be stopped by holding the pendulum. After the killings, he told sheriff’s deputies the clock was stopped at 10:59--the approximate time of the killings. Defense attorneys might use his assertion to bolster their contention that he staged the crimes. In one of the day’s rare light notes, the judge used the clock testimony to make note of the time.

“Ms. Farley,” he said, “it’s 4 o’clock and my pendulum mechanism has stopped. It’s time to recess.”