Granddaughter Is Held in Slaying
A Garden Grove woman was arrested Thursday in the stabbing death of her grandmother after calling police to report that she had found the woman dead.
Christina Marie Munoz, 23, was taken to Orange County Jail about 7 p.m. and booked on suspicion of homicide in the death of Lillian Patburg, 84, said Lt. Mike Handfield, a spokesman for the Garden Grove Police Department.
“She has been questioned and we have developed physical evidence at the scene that ties her to the homicide,” said Handfield.
He said investigators believe that Munoz stabbed the elderly woman in the neck. “An interview with [the granddaughter] and information we obtained from our search resulted in her being implicated.”
Police were notified about 2 p.m., Handfield said, when Munoz phoned them from a neighbor’s house to report that she had found her grandmother dead on the kitchen floor of the house the two shared in the 12600 block of Edith Drive.
“She ran to the neighbors to tell them that the grandmother had been stabbed and she’d been asleep and didn’t know who did it,” Handfield said.
The motive for the stabbing was unknown, he said, and the incident remains under investigation.
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