The suspect accused of kidnapping and murdering 15-year-old Morgan Hill resident Sierra LaMar was denied a motion to dismiss the charges against him in a court hearing last week.
Antolin Garcia Torres, a Morgan Hill resident who remains in custody at Santa Clara County Jail, appeared Jan. 22 for a hearing on his attorney’s motion to dismiss the case against him. Superior Court Judge Helen Williams denied the motion after the brief hearing at the Hall of Justice in San Jose, according to court officials.
Garcia Torres was arrested in May 2012 by sheriff’s deputies, weeks after Sierra disappeared. He is charged with murder and kidnapping in relation to Sierra’s disappearance.
He is also charged with three unrelated attempted carjackings and assaults in the parking lot of two Safeway grocery stores in Morgan Hill in 2009.
Garcia Torres’ trial on all the charges remains set for April 25. He pleaded not guilty to the charges in February 2014. If convicted, he faces a possible penalty of death.
Police say Sierra disappeared March 16, 2012 from her north Morgan Hill home while she was walking to her school bus stop near the intersection of Palm and Dougherty avenues. She was a sophomore at Sobrato High School when she disappeared.
Despite search efforts by law enforcement and a dedicated team of volunteers, who logged more than 54,000 hours of searching, Sierra’s body still has not been found.
On Monday, the San Jose Mercury News published excerpts from a bizarre jailhouse interview with a suspect in an unrelated case, who claimed the victim he is accused of killing was Sierra’s murderer. The suspect, Steven Hlebo, is accused of killing his co-worker Kyle Merrick in San Jose.
In the jailhouse interview, Hlebo claimed that Merrick was the one who kidnapped and murdered Sierra, and even helped frame Garcia Torres for the crime, according to the Mercury News.
