Trial opens for man accused in 5-year-old’s torture, death
The sadistic treatment of 5-year-old Mercedes Losoya ended with her being pronounced dead in a San Antonio hospital just over two years ago, authorities said.
On Tuesday, a jury heard chilling details of her abuse in a video of her sister, then 6, as testimony began in the trial of Jose Angel Ruiz, 27, who had once been their mother’s boyfriend.
“My sister throwed up (sic) all her food and didn’t come back to life,” Jordan Losoya told a Childsafe interviewer days after Mercedes died.
Ruiz was arrested even before an autopsy showed obvious evidence of “extreme abuse and torture,” in the words of a Bexar County medical examiner.
Charged in an eightcount indictment with injury to a child, he could face up to life in prison if convicted of the first degree felony.
The girls’ mother, Katrina Rose Mendoza, 24, had faced the same charge, but in August pleaded guilty to one count of assault of a child causing serious bodily injury by omission in exchange for a maximum prison term of 45 years.
The pair have been jailed
since Feb. 7, 2022, the evening they took Mercedes to a South Side hospital. The girl was unresponsive, and medical personnel were unable to revive her.
The Childsafe interview followed testimony from a San Antonio police officer and investigators from the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services who were called to the hospital the evening Mercedes died. Jordan was ordered placed in the care of the state shortly after.
In the video, Jordan described being punished by her mother, slapped in the face and hit with a belt. Mendoza would discipline Mercedes by holding her
“under the water (in the bathtub) sometimes, the water was running in her face.” She said she once saw her mom shove a spoon into her sister’s mouth to force-feed her.
Jordan told the interviewer that her sister had bruises “all right there,” as the child moved her hands over her hands, arms, torso and bottom.
That was when they lived at a friend’s house. The abuse seemed to intensify when they moved to Ruiz’s apartment. Jordan said Ruiz would spank Mercedes with a belt and put her in time outs in a closet in his bedroom.
“She was in the closet,
she peed on herself, and Jose said ‘Lick the pee and sleep there,’” Jordan told the interviewer. “He said for her to put her face in it, and I heard Mercedes scream. She smelled like pee, and he started putting thumb tacks into the skin on (the soles of ) her feet.”
Jordan said her mother watched as Ruiz inserted the thumb tacks into her daughter’s feet.
The child told the interviewer that in addition to spankings and “whippings” with the belt, her mother used a large blue chancla, or sandal, on the girls.
A San Antonio police officer, a hospital charge nurse and two Child Protective Services case workers who investigated the death started the testimony.
“Mercedes was the bad kid,” prosecutor Marissa Giovenco told jurors in her opening statement, warning that they would have to see and hear horrific things as the trial unfolded.
She said Mendoza and Ruiz were dating and at some point in the relationship, Mendoza complained to Ruiz how Mercedes would not listen to her.
“He said, ‘Let me have her, she will listen to me.’ He takes custody and takes her to his apartment. Mendoza and Jordan joined them later, for about two weeks. Those were the last two weeks of her (Mercedes’) life. Both Katrina and Jose are guilty of killing 5year-old Mercedes.”
In an unusual opening, defense attorney Theresa Mallon Connolly told the jury that “precious little Mercedes Losoya was killed on Feb. 7, 2022,” and began to talk about murder, a word that both sides had agreed would not be used in the trial.
Prosecutors objected at least six times during Connolly’s opening statement, saying she was violating her own motions to not say certain things before the jury. Connolly also took issue with KSAT-12’S livestream of the proceedings, saying it should not be allowed because the station’s news director had been subpoenaed by the defense.
State District Judge Stephanie Boyd sent the jury out of the room and admonished Connolly for an improper opening statement, telling her that she needed to stick to telling the jury what evidence would show.
Affidavits backing arrest warrants for Mendoza and Ruiz told a gruesome story of ongoing brutality.
Mendoza told police that she had let Ruiz punish the child after moving in with him and that he forced Mercedes to eat feces and drink urine, the documents state.
When she died, Mercedes was missing sections of hair and had bruising, scratching and swelling all over her body, including bruises and cuts to her inner thighs from pinching, the affidavits stated.
When Ruiz was taken into custody while he waited in his car at Southwest General Hospital, now Texas Vista Medical Center. A gun was in the vehicle and he was charged with violating a bond condition from a previous arrest in addition to the child injury case.
Boyd has said she plans to sentence Mendoza after Ruiz’s trial concludes.