$1-Million Bail Set in Girl’s Stabbing

It isn’t the fate of her daughter, accused of killing another teenage girl and sitting in Juvenile Hall on $1-million bail, that worries Aurora Duarte.

Instead, she sympathizes with the parents of 17-year-old Yolanda Acevedo, fatally stabbed Friday in an alley behind the Anaheim apartment complex where both families live. Duarte said she’d exchange her life for the girl’s in an instant.

As for her 16-year-old daughter, Linda, “I’m not scared for her,” Duarte said. “If she did something wrong, she needs to learn a lesson.”

Duarte spoke Tuesday afternoon after her daughter’s court appearance as a murder suspect, during which her arraignment was postponed until Jan. 30 and bail was set. Nuvia Jeanneth Constantino, 17, is also accused of murder and also being held on $1-million bail at Orange County Juvenile Hall.

They are being prosecuted as adults. Linda Duarte is also accused of assaulting a second girl and being an accessory to murder.

During their brief appearance in North Justice Center in Fullerton, both suspects stood behind their attorneys and tried to avert their eyes from news cameras. Clad in a yellow jail jumpsuit, Duarte wore a somber expression; Constantino, in a green jumpsuit, repeatedly exchanged broad grins with her two sisters.

Constantino’s mother also attended the hearing but declined to be interviewed afterward.

Prosecutor Howard Gundy and Aurora Duarte agree that there was no reason for the two suspects to want to kill Acevedo, but that the three had been exchanging sour looks and strong words for several weeks. Acevedo seemed to have it in for the Duartes since mid-December, Linda Duarte’s mother said: That’s when a friend mistakenly told Acevedo that the mother had made an obscene gesture toward her.

“There’s just some bad blood between the victim and these two girls that escalated,” Gundy said after the hearing. “It wasn’t over boys. It wasn’t over anything.”

He said that, through witnesses, investigators will examine each girl’s role in the clash that led to the killing, including Acevedo’s. “There may be some self-defense issues involved,” Gundy said.

All three girls liked to fight, Aurora Duarte said. Her daughter often brawled with other girls and was attending an alternative school because her fighting became too much for Anaheim High School administrators.

“I’m not going to tell you she was an angel, because she wasn’t,” Duarte said of her daughter. “The other girl wasn’t perfect, either, but she didn’t deserve to die. She was so young. She still had a chance to change.”