Jury Gets Case of Mother Killed, Cut Up

Telling lies to police, his college classmates and even the jury that will decide his fate, accused killer Jason Victor Bautista will say anything to escape responsibility for strangling and dismembering his mother, an Orange County prosecutor told jurors Tuesday.

“He lies like most people breathe. It just comes naturally,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Murray, standing behind Bautista’s chair as the defendant turned and glared at him during closing arguments. The jury would begin its deliberations later in the day.

Bautista’s attorney pleaded with jurors to believe his client’s contention that he accidentally suffocated his mother after she tried to stab him in their Riverside apartment.

Assistant Public Defender Don Ronaldson, saying Bautista was the product of an abusive home and a mother both sides agree was mentally ill, believed Jane Bautista, 41, wanted to kill him when she approached him with a knife in their Riverside apartment in January 2003.

Bautista, now 22, and his younger brother grew up “essentially in a war zone, under attack from their own mother,” the lawyer said. Killing his mother was “Jason’s eruption when, after years of abuse, it appeared Jane was actually going to use her knife on him.”

Bautista didn’t tell police, his lawyer said, because he thought they wouldn’t believe him. He challenged jurors to blame society for not being more involved in caring for the mentally ill, thus preventing the abuse Bautista and his brother endured.

Murray countered that Bautista purposely killed his mother because her mental illness was interfering with his life. After strangling her, then tossing her headless and handless body off Ortega Highway in Orange County, Murray said, Bautista returned to school two days later and invited his lab partners to a Super Bowl party at his apartment.

The defendant’s account of the struggle with his mother on the floor doesn’t ring true, Murray said.

“If you kill somebody on accident, you try to revive them,” he said.

Also, Jane Bautista appeared to have been beaten so hard before her death that the bones above her eyes disintegrated when touched, according to testimony from the coroner who examined her, and a fist-size bruise colored her right cheek. Her neck had a bruise the shape of a finger.

Bautista -- “the one with the head still on his shoulders” -- has wrongfully tried to portray himself as the victim in the scenario, Murray said.

Growing up with a paranoid schizophrenic mother must have been difficult, Murray acknowledged, but Bautista had other options, including trying to get her treatment.

“He murdered his mother. He dumped her like trash. And now he wants a break from you,” Murray said. “Nobody cared about Jane Bautista when she was alive. Somebody should care now.”