Alexander Lucas Barnes couldn't take his girlfriend's baby crying any longer, so the Santa Ana 20-year-old smashed the boy's skull into a wall.
As wished, Isiah Prim-Ortiz, just 9 months old, stopped crying. Forever.
Today, Barnes was sentenced to 25 years to life in state prison. Who is crying now?
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He was at his mother's home, watching Isaiah alone for the first time the morning of Oct. 6, 2009, as his girlfriend had left for a class at a nearby community college. The baby's crying so angered him that he crushed Isaiah's head against a wall. The force was so strong the child suffered multiple fractures to both sides of the
head.
Barnes then put the baby back in his crib, and sometime before Barnes' mother returned home just after 1 p.m., she went to check on Isaiah and discovered he was not breathing. The baby was pronounced dead at a local hospital at 4:07 p.m.
A jury on Nov. 3 found Barnes guilty of second-degree murder.
Previous coverage:
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.