Images and testimony detail arc of abuse that led to girl’s death
The mother of a 5-year-old girl beaten to death in 2022 spent hours describing to jurors at the trial of Jose Angel Ruiz how her then-boyfriend tortured and humiliated the child.
Ruiz, 27, is charged with eight counts of injury to a child causing serious bodily injury. Katrina Rose Mendoza has pleaded guilty to child assault for her part in the killing of her daughter, Mercedes Losoya, and testified Thursday under an agreement with prosecutors that limits her possible sentence to 45 years in prison.
Ruiz could get life in prison if convicted.
Testimony this week established that Mercedes was pronounced dead at a South Side hospital on Feb. 7, 2022, where Mendoza and Ruiz took her — unresponsive, covered in bruises and abrasions and missing teeth and hair. A Bexar County medical examiner determined that she had endured “extreme torture and abuse.”
Jurors and the courtroom gallery gasped at photographs that Mendoza, 24, said Ruiz took of the girl at his apartment on his cellphone in the weeks before her death, after she and her two daughters had moved in with him.
Mendoza said Ruiz had told her he would deal with Mercedes because the mother was not “disciplining her enough, and she didn’t respect me.”
She said she allowed it. The child’s relatives wept, and some had to leave, at the sight of Mercedes with bruises all over her face, kneeling naked with her arms bound to a pole. More pictures showed her with a bloody nose and a fat lip with two teeth missing, the top of her head with a huge bald spot, and of Mercedes standing on thumbtacks in a closet used for time outs that had a Ring camera in it so Ruiz could monitor her.
Before a recess for lunch, the jury also saw a close-up of Mercedes’ face, smeared with dog feces.
When the trial resumed, there was more weeping, this time at a video showing Mercedes screaming and crying, sitting in the back seat of a car as Ruiz yelled at her to hold a heavy jug.
“Hold it up! Hold it up!” Ruiz shouted as the child sobbed uncontrollably.
Prosecutor Marissa Giovenco asked Mendoza to describe punishment she had seen either in person, or on the photographs, that was doled out by Ruiz.
“Jose would stick her underwear or socks or clothing in her mouth and pull it out quickly,” Mendoza told the jury. She believed it caused two of her teeth to be knocked out.
Sometimes Mercedes would wet her pants when she was scared, Mendoza said, which happened frequently when she was left with Ruiz.
“He would mop the floor with her in her urine, get her on the ground and drag her in her urine,” Mendoza told the jury.
At times, Mendoza said, Ruiz would shove the child’s urinesoaked clothes in Mercedes’ mouth, and hold his fingers over her nose until she stopped breathing and passed out.
Mendoza said Ruiz would pull clumps of hair out of Mercedes’ head and would also force the girl’s sister, Jordan, who was 6 at the time, to join in the hair-pulling.
On cross-examination, defense attorney Theresa Connolly asked about the number of times Texas Child Protective Services case workers investigated her. Mendoza could not remember.
Connolly focused on the type of punishment Mendoza herself conducted on Mercedes and asked for examples of things that the child did that made her “bad.”
“She would lie, talk back, she wouldn’t keep her hands still while in time out,” the witness replied.
Mendoza spoke calmly, in a monotone.
She testified that the girls were enrolled in school, Jordan in first grade and Mercedes in kindergarten, but she wouldn’t take them because she liked to be with them. Mendoza could not remember the name of Mercedes’ school.
The trial is being heard in the 187th District Court, where Judge Stephanie Boyd plans to sentence Mendoza after its conclusion. Mendoza has applied for probation.