Trial delayed for dead boy’s mother
A judge has postponed the trial of a San Antonio woman accused with her boyfriend of transporting the lifeless body of her 5-year-old son and abandoning it in a ravine in Colorado.
Nickolle Cristina Aguilar and Daniel Garcia are facing separate charges in connection with the death of Domenic Patrick Aguilar, whose body was found near Rocky Mountain National Park after the pair fled to Costa Rica, according to authorities.
Garcia, who has been charged with murder, is scheduled for trial May 3. Aguilar is facing a charge of injury to a child by omission, and her trial was scheduled to start Feb. 16. But during a pretrial hearing to discuss evidence, state District Judge Velia Meza rescheduled Aguilar’s trial for March 22.
Only Garcia was in court for the hearing, though Aguilar was in a holding cell next to the courtroom.
One of the prosecutors, Assistant District Attorney Oscar Salinas, handed defense lawyers lists of police reports and other evidence that will be available for the attorneys to examine. Garcia’s lawyers, Michael Gross and Brigitte Garza, didn’t raise many issues with the list. Aguilar’s attorney, Charles Bunk, said he thought it should be longer.
“For the evidence (we think) they have, they’re only listing 40 documents. We know there’d be more than 40 documents,” Bunk told the judge.
Meza noted that the FBI has its own evidence management system, and Salinas told her that San Antonio police and his office are working with the federal agents to obtain that portion of the evidence.
Salinas also told the judge that the prosecution expects to call expert witnesses, and the defense lawyers, Bunk in particular, expressed concern about the sufficiency of time before a Feb. 16 trial to know more about those witnesses and to challenge their qualifications.
After some back and forth, Meza rescheduled Aguilar’s trial.
Law officers began investigating the case after the child’s grandmother, Sirle Maria Acevedo Cevallos, called the FBI and San Antonio police in 2021 to report that she believed the child had died at a northeastern San Antonio hotel around July 25, 2021.
According to court documents, Acevedo, in an interview with FBI agents in Costa Rica, said that she tracked her daughter down in the Central American country and was told by Aguilar that Domenic had suffered an “unexplainable death.”
Instead of reporting the boy’s death to authorities in San Antonio, Aguilar and Garcia drove to Colorado the next morning to a campground,