Opening statements started Jan. 30 in the trial for Antolin Garcia Torres, who is suspected of kidnapping and murdering 15-year-old Sierra LaMar of Morgan Hill.
Santa Clara County Deputy District Attorney David Boyd started for the prosecution, spending the afternoon describing the circumstances leading up to Sierra’s disappearance March 16, 2012, and some of the evidence linking her last moments to Garcia Torres.
“Sierra LaMar is dead, and this man killed her,” Boyd began his opening statement, pointing at Garcia Torres. Boyd then showed the jury—consisting of six women, six men and seven alternates—the last known photo of Sierra, a selfie she took on her MacBook Pro computer just after 7 a.m. the day she disappeared.
Boyd continued by describing Sierra’s habits as a “normal teenage girl;” a timeline of known whereabouts for the teen and Garcia Torres around the time of her disappearance; and some of the “thousands of pages” of evidence that showed the two crossed paths in the hours after Sierra, a sophomore at Sobrato High School, was last seen.
When Boyd played a recording of Sierra’s mother, Marlene LaMar’s phone call to 911 that evening to report her missing, sobs arose from several people in the packed courtroom. In the recording, Marlene’s voice quavered as she desperately asked the dispatcher if police could issue an Amber alert.
Marlene, Sierra’s father Steve LaMar and several more of the teen’s family members were in the courtroom audience.
Sierra’s remains have not been found, but Boyd told the jury it is highly unlikely she ran away from home. An active social media user who always had her smartphone with her, using it to constantly communicate with her friends and family, Sierra was “totally dependent” on her parents as she had no financial means of her own, or even a form of identification other than her school ID.
“Sierra’s body has not been found. The only thing found are traces of her, found in (the) car owned by that man,” Boyd told the jury, again pointing at Garcia Torres. These traces include DNA that matches Sierra’s profile and a hair that was stuck to a piece of rope in the trunk of Garcia Torres’ red Volkswagen Jetta.
Boyd presented photos on a large flat-screen monitor throughout his opening presentation, as he described Sierra’s cell phone and a bag containing her clothes and other belongings, which were found in two different locations off the side of the road in the rural areas surrounding her home near the intersection of Palm and Dougherty avenues in north Morgan Hill. The cell phone was found March 17, 2012 in a field with no tire tracks or footprints around it, suggesting it had been thrown to the location, Boyd said.
Sierra’s bag, found a couple days later near Laguna Avenue, contained the clothing she was wearing when she left home that morning to take her routine walk to her school bus stop, Boyd said. This includes the San Jose Sharks sweatshirt she was wearing in her last selfie, underwear, bra and jeans. “That leaves her naked,” Boyd said.
Furthermore, Sierra’s jeans held a “very strong odor of urine,” he told the jury.
Also in her bag were Sierra’s shoes, socks, lunch money, jewelry, makeup, house keys, an inhaler, hair band—“all the things you might expect a 15-year-old girl to carry to school, including school books,” Boyd said.
Garcia Torres, 25 of Morgan Hill, sat quietly throughout the trial’s opening, occasionally speaking quietly with his attorney. He wore a gray sweater on top of a blue buttoned-down shirt, his hair cropped short and neatly combed.
In addition to the murder and kidnapping charge, Garcia Torres also faces three unrelated counts for attempted kidnapping, stemming from a series of incidents in 2009 in which he allegedly attacked three women in the parking lots of two Safeway stores in Morgan Hill. Boyd began to describe these incidents before court adjourned Jan. 30.
If convicted of the murder charge, he faces a possible penalty of death or life in prison without parole.
Boyd further told the jury that Garcia Torres had the “opportunity” to kidnap and kill Sierra, as his whereabouts cannot be accounted for from about 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. the day Sierra disappeared. That would give him plenty of time to commit the crime and dispose of Sierra’s body in a remote location, Boyd said.
Three days before Sierra disappeared, Boyd said Garcia Torres purchased a gallon of bleach and a turkey baster from Safeway. When he showed photos of these items to the jury, the audience gasped. Boyd explained that bleach can be used to eliminate DNA evidence, and a turkey baster can be used to apply the solution to intimate “areas where DNA is found.”
Investigators determined Garcia Torres purchased these items by searching the records on his Safeway Club card. The bleach and turkey baster were not found at Garcia Torres residence at a mobile home park in south Morgan Hill when detectives searched there, Boyd added.
Boyd’s opening statement will continue Jan. 31 in the same courtroom at the Hall of Justice in San Jose. Opening statements by Garcia Torres’ defense team will follow, before witness testimony begins. The trial is expected to last up to five months.
