Thread: Police: Woman targeted baby at clinic

http://www.gallatinnewsexaminer.com/app ... 309/MTCN04

Police: Woman targeted baby at clinic
Murder suspect wanted to use child to keep boyfriend, detective testifies


By SHEILA BURKE
Staff Writer

Published: Thursday, 03/02/06
Christina Sanchez was trying to hold on to her boyfriend.

The plan was to steal Hilda Griselda Gutierrez's 1-month-old son and convince Sanchez's lover after he returned home from jail that it was his child and that she had given birth to the baby while he was behind bars.

"She said she had a miscarriage and that she knew she had to have a baby by the time the boyfriend comes out, because if she didn't, then the boyfriend was going to leave her," Metro detective Marvin Rivera testified yesterday during a preliminary hearing for Sanchez.

Sanchez is accused of killing Gutierrez, 21, and her daughter, 3, during the attempted kidnapping Dec. 2. The girl was beaten and suffocated with a plastic bag when she began screaming during the attack on her mother, Rivera said she told detectives.

Sanchez, 39, and her daughter's boyfriend, Danny Ray Anderson, 19, each is charged with two counts of criminal homicide.

The attempted kidnapping was foiled because Gutierrez's boyfriend came home just after the killings, he testified. Rudy Aguilar told police that a man and a woman ran from his apartment as he was going in.

The detective told the court he saw the slain toddler first when he stepped inside the apartment at 590 Whispering Oaks Place. She was lying face down in a bedroom with a plastic bag over her face. Lying face up on the kitchen floor was the girl's mother. She had been stabbed to death, he said.

The infant was left unharmed.

Aguilar, 25, wept yesterday as he listened to Rivera's testimony translated into Spanish over headphones. The father, who now cares for his infant son, removed the headphones during some of the more gruesome testimony and wiped tears from his face with a tattered napkin.

He sat in the front row of the courtroom, alongside two women and a man who appeared to be family members. At times, all of them cried.

The father's incredible account about seeing the murder suspects rush past him just as he arrived home made him an early focus of the investigation. Detectives dubbed him "a person of interest" in the case.

A day after the killings, Aguilar, a Honduran immigrant who is in the country illegally, was arrested and charged with identity theft. Police said he had an incorrect identity number on his resident alien card. Prosecutors ultimately dropped the charges and turned him over to federal officials. Aguilar spent nine days in jail.

The arrest angered some members of the local Hispanic community, who argued that immigrant crime victims would become distrustful of police and could refuse to come forward in the future.

A break in the double murder came after Aguilar received information from two women who were friends of his deceased girlfriend, Rivera testified yesterday.

The week before the murders, Gutierrez, her children, and the two women went to a clinic in Woodbine. One of the friends told Rudy Aguilar that the woman he had described coming out of the apartment after the killings fit the description of a woman who struck up a conversation with the mother at the clinic.

The female friend was asked to look through several mug shots of women meeting the description.

"And it came to a point that (the friend) started crying and shaking and having a real hard time because she identified Christina (Sanchez)," Rivera said. Rudy Aguilar later also identified Sanchez in a photo lineup.

Sanchez already was wanted on an outstanding theft charge.

Gutierrez's child was not the woman's first pick, investigators were told. Sanchez had met another woman at the clinic in Woodbine and went to her home first, but her boyfriend was there, Rivera said.

Gutierrez gave Sanchez her address after Sanchez offered to sell documents that would help illegal immigrants move freely in and out of the United States, the detective said. It was unclear whether Gutierrez intended to buy the documents. After yesterday's hearing, Metro General Sessions Judge Sue Evans bound Sanchez's case over to the grand jury.

Anderson, Sanchez's co-defendant, is scheduled to appear in court Monday. •


Published: Thursday, 03/02/06

In this one article we have murder, identity theft, conspiracy to commit murder and who knows how many illegal aliens?

Just more good folks with family values by Bush's standards.

All the guilty parties, Anderson included, should be punished to the full extent of the law.