Key evidence disputed
At issue are fingerprint on stun gun battery, strand of hair on rope fromdefendant’s trunk
SAN JOSE — Witnesses called by the defense in the trial of the man accused of killing missing Morgan Hill teen Sierra LaMar focused Thursday on some key pieces of evidence that could play a major role in the outcome of the “no body” case.
From morning until late afternoon, two issues in particular were paramount: whether defendant Antolin Garcia-Torres’ fingerprint could have been on a stun gun battery for innocent reasons, and if a strand of Sierra’s long brown hair really was on a rope in the trunk of his Volkswagen Jetta.
Both the defense and the prosecution also closely queried a witness who said she saw a light brown and gold car that didn’t belong to Garcia-Torres stop near a field where the 15year-old’s cellphone was found March 16, 2012, the morning she vanished on the way to catch a school bus in a rural community north of Morgan Hill.
Garcia-Torres, now 25, has pleaded not guilty to charges of killing Sierra and attempting to kidnap three other women three years earlier. If convicted, he could be sentenced to death or to life in prison without parole. Sierra’s body has not been found, despite a yearslong effort by more than 750 volunteers from around the Bay Area.
The first defense witness to take the stand in the Santa Clara County Superior Court trial was Tiean Kaho, the woman who reported seeing a car that didn’t belong to GarciaTorres stopped by the side of Scheller Avenue.
Kaho reported what she saw because she thought it might
have something to do with Sierra’s disappearance, she said. But she acknowledged she couldn’t actually see into the vehicle. And initially, she thought the driver might be intoxicated because he or she was weaving when they pulled out in front of her.
In the afternoon, Garcia-Torres’ lead lawyer, Al Lopez, questioned how 58 strands of hair — including one of Sierra’s — got on the rope in his client’s trunk since they are not evident in a crime-scene photo taken by a sheriff’s deputy. Crime lab analysts months later found the hairs on the rope, some of which are visible in a photo they took.
Throughout the trial, Lopez has repeatedly brought up the possibility of crosscontamination, possibly by deputies who unknowingly transferred hair to the rope. He has also left open the possibility that the hair evidence could have been planted. To support his point, he put an expert in forensic photography on the stand.
“I did not find the presence of hair,” said the expert, Gary Stutchman.
Prosecutor David Boyd suggested that there are other reasons why the strands of hair were not visible in the crime-scene photo, including the wide aperture of the camera.
To demonstrate his point, he showed the jury eight different photo- graphs of the same rural scene taken using different aperture settings. The foreground was in focus in some, while the background was blurry.
Stutchman disagreed that the aperture could change the clarity of images of the rope photo, saying it was different than the rural scene Boyd featured.
But Stutchman’s response to a written question from one of the jurors could be interpreted as supporting the prosecution’s theory.
The juror wanted to know whether Stutchman could read part of the label on a bag of cat food, also removed from Garcia-Torres’ trunk and shown in the photo of the rope.
The image was too fuzzy for Stutchman to make out, which he attributed to the glare off the bag from the lighting.
Another witness, defense investigator David Jaquez, focused on the fingerprint found on the battery of a stun gun dropped by the assailant in the attempted kidnappings of women from Safeway parking lots in Morgan Hill in 2009. The prosecution contends that Garcia-Torres bought the same kind of battery before the attempted kidnappings with his sister’s Safeway club card, but there is no surveillance footage of the purchase.
The defense claims Garcia-Torres’ fingerprint is on the battery because he worked at Safeway as a bag boy and reshelved battery packages that had split open. Weeks ago, a manager at Safeway testified that the chain’s policy at the time was to discard such damaged property in a banana bin in the back of the store.
Safeway changed the policy and began selling discount batteries in tapedup packages in July 2012, about four months after Sierra disappeared. But Lopez had suggested that policy was not always followed.
On Thursday, Jaquez testified he found a tapedup package of batteries on a discount shelf at the Tennant Avenue Safeway in Morgan Hill in 2013 — about seven months after the store changed its policy. However, the jury may conclude from the testimony that Garcia-Torres may have been familiar with retaping packages of batteries because the practice may have gone on in March 2016, about four months before the policy officially changed.
Earlier this week, both sides put witnesses on the stand who debated another issue: whether Sierra’s phone could have turned on and off after she vanished, just by getting wet. The phone reactivated at 10:46 p.m. on the night Sierra disappeared, while GarciaTorres was at home. The defense contends the phone could have been turned on by Sierra herself or the “real” abductor, while the prosecution brought in a Samsung engineer who said it could have been the rain. Contact Tracey Kaplan at 408-278-3482.