Sierra LaMar: Convicted killer’s home life included father raping young relative
By Tracey Kaplan
The Mercury News
SAN JOSE — Hoping to persuade jurors to opt for life without parole rather than the death penalty, lawyers for the man convicted of killing missing teen Sierra LaMar intend to bring in a psychologist to describe his hellish childhood, including having to live with a father now serving a life sentence for raping a female relative in their home, starting when she was 7 years old.
Now, prosecutors want to retain a psychologist of their own, essentially to test whether Antolin Garcia-Torres “truly has ineffective coping skills or unresolved grief” and any known mental impairment from childhood neglect, violence, poverty and incest.
In a motion filed this week, prosecutor David Boyd said that by having Dr. Gretchen White testify about the effects of Garcia-Torres’ childhood, “the defense is putting the defendant’s mental state in issue,” meaning making it fair game under case law.
The defense, led by lawyer Brian Matthews, is expected to oppose Boyd’s request to have his expert spend a total of eight hours conducting clinical interviews with Garcia-Torres, a mental status exam and associated psychological testing.
A hearing is set for Monday in Santa Clara County Superior Court before Judge Vanessa A. Zecher.
Garcia-Torres, 26, was convicted earlier this week of kidnapping and killing 15-year-old Sierra LaMar, who was on her way to her school bus stop in a rural community north of Morgan Hill when she vanished five years ago. Her body has not been found despite a yearslong search by more than 750 volunteers from around the Bay Area. The jury, which reached a verdict in two days after a three-month trial, also convicted him of attempting to kidnap three other women from Safeway parking lots in Morgan Hill in 2009.
The same Santa Clara County Superior Court jury is set to begin hearing evidence Tuesday during the “penalty phase” of the trial, after which it will decide whether Garcia-Torres should be sentenced to death or to life in prison without parole.
In a brief report filed with Boyd’s motion, the doctor retained by the defense listed other factors besides incest that she contends affected Garcia-Torres: parental criminality, child maltreatment, low levels of parental involvement, poor family bonding, family conflict, parental attitudes favorable to substance abuse and violence, and parent-child separation.
Garcia-Torres’ family background may ultimately be seen as grounds for sympathy or as the pathological root of his criminality. But his father’s sexual molestation trial helps illuminate what life was like in the family home where Garcia-Torres was raised.
Garcia-Torres’ father, Genaro Garcia Fernandez, was convicted of 17 counts of child molestation in late September of 2012, just six months after Sierra LaMar disappeared on March 16, 2012.
The jury in that case, which received media coverage at the time, reached a verdict in two days, just as the jurors did in his son’s trial earlier this week.
During the trial, witnesses testified that the 5-feet-4-inch Fernandez ruled his house with an iron hand.
“He hit me,” his wife Laura Torres testified, ”a lot.”
According to one of Garcia-Torres’ sisters, the victim would try to keep Fernandez out of her bedroom by pulling out the drawers of a bureau to block the entryway.
The prosecutor in the father’s case, Murat Ozgur noted that Fernandez eventually apologized to the young woman he repeatedly molested, but essentially claimed it was her fault.
“He explained, she wanted it, she liked it,” Ozgur said in court, adding that even though Fernandez began raping her at a young age, “he claimed he didn’t take her virginity.”
The doctor Boyd wants to hire is well-known forensic psychologist Kris Mohandie. He worked for the Los Angeles Police Department for 14 years counseling officers and advising them during hostage-crisis situations. Despite his background in law enforcement, Mohandie also has been hired by the defense about a third of the time, and he stressed his independence at a local trial in 2013.
At that trial, Mohandie testified that the Silicon Valley engineer who gunned down three of his bosses after being fired from Siport in Santa Clara was not insane — and the jury agreed.
http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/05/1...eating-mother/
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