Life term for killer in Sierra LaMar case
Marlene LaMar took the witness stand for the last time Tuesday. She didn’t need to. She specifically asked to bypass a podium toward the back of the San Jose courtroom so she could have a better view of the man who killed her 15-yearold daughter, Sierra, before a judge sentenced him to life in prison.
“I find it incomprehensible that you can make a choice to commit such a heinous, violent crime,” LaMar told Antolin Garcia-Torres in Santa Clara County Superior Court Tuesday. “You have robbed Sierra of what God had planned for her.”
She urged the 26-year-old Garcia-Torres to “repent and make it right with God” by revealing the location of her daughter’s body.
“End the torment by telling us where Sierra is,” she told him. “The truth will set you free.”
He didn’t tell them where
her body was. So, when Judge Vanessa Zecher sentenced Garcia-Torres to life in prison without the possibility of parole, Sierra’s father said afterward the moment was “bittersweet.”
“You’re lucky for the sentence you received. You still get to see your daughters,” Steve LaMar told Garcia-Torres in court. “The sentence you gave us because of your actions is much worse. I can never see Sierra again.
“I hope the fact that you not admitting where Sierra is … will eat away at your brain like cancer,” he told Garcia-Torres.
Garcia-Torres received his punishment after Zecher rejected the latest attempt by defense attorneys to get the conviction tossed. The sentencing included an order to register as a sex offender and to pay a yet to be determined amount in restitution.
A Santa Clara County Superior Court jury convicted him in May of kidnapping and killing the Morgan Hill girl as she went to catch a bus for school on March 16, 2012.
The jury in the highprofile capital murder case voted in June to give Garcia-Torres life in prison without parole instead of the death penalty. He was also found guilty of three additional counts of attempted kidnapping stemming from separate 2009 carjacking incidents at Safeway stores in Morgan Hill.
The sentencing came more than four years after Sierra vanished before a typical school day. A day after she disappeared, her phone was found in a field less than a mile from her home. The day after that discovery, her purse and the clothes she was wearing when she left home for the last time turned up a short distance from where her phone was found.
The prosecution’s key piece of evidence in the conviction of GarciaTorres was a strand of Sierra’s hair found on rope in Garcia-Torres’ Volkswagen Jetta.
In a last effort for a new trial on Tuesday, defense attorney Alfonso Lopez sought to cast doubt on the evidence by questioning the credibility of the prosecution’s lead investigator, Sgt. Herman Leon of the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office.
Leon’s inaccurate testimony in a prior, unrelated murder case resulted in a new trial, and defense attorneys used that as grounds in their attempt to get the conviction in the LaMar case overturned. But Zecher denied the motion before proceeding with the sentencing of Garcia-Torres.
Defense attorneys said they will appeal the court decision. Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen said outside the courtroom that he is confident the appeal will be rejected.
The prosecution, family and friends celebrated the sentencing as a victory. But one thing was still missing.
“It’s deeply unsatisfying that we still don’t know where Sierra is,” Rosen said. “I hope and pray that one day we will find her, and we will be able to lay her to rest. And we will be able to tell her goodbye.”