Update, December 20, 5:29 p.m.: 31-year-old Angel Duarte Cerna was sentenced today to 25 years to life in state prison
for suffocating and murdering his wife in Anaheim before dumping her
body on the side of a freeway in Los Angeles County in 2006.
“At the sentencing today, five family members of Gabriella
Herrera told the court that while the defendant received justice under
man's law, he will also receive justice under God's law,” reports the Orange County District Attorney's Office.
]
Original Post, December 14, 3 p.m.: Gabriella “Gaby” Herrera was a
spiritual person, the loving mother of two sons, a dear sister, a
paralegal and, sadly, for eight months the wife of a smooth-talking
murderer she'd met at an LA Fitness in Tustin.
Today, after less than three hours of deliberation, an Orange County jury of nine women and three men determined that Angel Duarte Cerna was guilty of committing first-degree murder in the 2006 Anaheim killing of the 31-year-old Herrera.
Police
said Cerna dumped the corpse in a shallow grave near a Los Angeles
hillside homeless encampment off Highway 60, and then coldly pretended
his wife had taken a solo vacation.
Cerna–a native of El Salvador and a driver for Mercedes-Benz's House of Imports
in Buena Park–showed no emotion at the verdict during a two-minute
hearing, although he immediately told his legal representative, a public
defender, that he wants to appeal the conviction as soon as possible.
Herrera's family quietly wept after the announcement inside Judge David A. Thompson's
eighth-floor Santa Ana courtroom. They later hugged prosecutor Howard
Gundy, as well as Anaheim police officers involved in solving the crime
that began as a simple missing-person case. “Thank you so much,” one
family member told Gundy.
Within hours of Herrera's
disappearance, her family suspected an odd-acting Cerna
was responsible. He'd repeatedly lied about his whereabouts and the
rocky status of his marriage. Soon, he had moved out of the couple's
apartment, quit his job, didn't return phone calls from detectives and
told acquaintances he wanted to move to Canada. Meanwhile, his wife
was missing, and he wasn't doing anything to help find her.
For almost two months, Herrera was Jane Doe #81 inside the Los Angeles County morgue.
In his closing argument, alternate Public Defender Wayne Davis
argued that no physical evidence or eyewitness could definitively tie
Cerna to the killing. He suggested she may have gone to a grocery
store and been silently kidnapped and murdered by unknown assailants.
He also said that police had “twisted” facts, though he acknowledged his client had acted “creepy” and “weird.”
“But acting
strange does not mean he killed someone,” said Davis, who'd mocked the
prosecution's case as weak. “Either my client is a genus or an idiot.”
Or a creepy, idiotic killer.
Cerna
waited hours to contact police about his missing wife, and then,
apparently unaware that cell-phone towers record the location of
phone usage, lied to a 911 operator about his whereabouts. He'd claimed he was in Buena Park, where he worked. But records show
he made the call nearly 40 minutes away, from Baldwin Park, an LA suburb.
You
know what else was just happened to be in Baldwin Park? Herrera's
missing car, which was eventually located in a Burger King parking lot.
“A coincidence!” explained Davis.
But
veteran homicide prosecutor Gundy couldn't hide his contempt for Cerna,
who had an ugly history of domestic violence with a prior wife. In the
trial's most dramatic moment, he reminded the jury that the coroner had
estimated it may have taken the killer five minutes to cause Herrera's
asphyxiation by holding a violet-colored pillow over her face and
muffling her screams for help.
(Indeed, one of her sons from a
prior relationship told authorities he heard a scream on the night
his mother is presumed to have been killed; he left his bedroom to
investigate, didn't hear anything else and returned to bed.)
To
emphasize the premeditation and deliberation of the killing, Gundy stood
silently in front of the jury for 105 seconds, the shortest possible
time it took Cerna to suffocate his wife. It felt like an eternity.
Eventually, Herrera's family members in attendance began crying. Halfway
through, Gundy said softly, “All this time, he's pressing down on her
face with the pillow.”
The 38-year-old Cerna, seated at the defense table, closed his eyes.
Several jurors shook their heads and stole quick glances at the defendant.
“This is a verdict he's earned,” Gundy said in conclusion. “Hold him responsible.”
Cerna
is scheduled to be sentenced on Dec. 20. Judge Thompson has two
options: give him probation or a 25-years-to-life sentence in a
California prison.
–R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.