Brutal childhood didn’t avert life sentence
As a boy, Jose Angel Ruiz was singled out for mistreatment by his stepfather, who beat him nearly to death and routinely forced him to stand for hours while holding heavy objects.
His defense lawyer described that history to jurors who would soon deliberate his sentence for the torture killing of Mercedes Losoya, 5.
The jury capped the horrific trial by taking 12 minutes late Monday to send Ruiz to prison for life. The panel had taken just 45 minutes to find Ruiz, 27, guilty of seven counts of injury to a child causing serious bodily injury and one count of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
In a week of agonizing testimony, the reasons why Mercedes wound up dead in a hospital emergency room on Feb. 7, 2022, reverberated through the Cadena-reeves Justice Center. The 187th District Court was packed with lawyers sitting among relatives of the girl and her accused killer, the proceedings shown live online by KSAT-12 and on state District Judge Stephanie Boyd’s Youtube page.
Witnesses described gruesome treatment of Mercedes that her mother, Katrina Rose Mendoza, allowed to continue after she moved into Ruiz’s apartment with her and another daughter, Jordan, then 6.
Mendoza, now 24, a co-defendant who has pleaded guilty to assault in exchange for her cooperation with prosecutors, is expected to be sentenced in the same courtroom at a later date.
Before the jury left to conduct one of the shortest deliberations on record for punishment, they heard about but didn’t see another image taken from Ruiz’s phone as evidence. He had forced Mercedes to show her private parts for his camera during one of his discipline sessions with the girl.
Boyd did not allow that photo to be displayed, but prosecutors brought it up in their closing arguments to cap off a case that was strewn with horrific photographs and video of torture and humiliation from the defendant’s phone.
He had shared them with Mendoza.
To defense attorney Loraine Efron, the trial was “Chapter 2” of Ruiz’s life, and in her opening statement in the punishment phase, she offered reasons why Mercedes never had a chance while in his control.
She invoked what forensic psychologist and defense expert Dr. John Matthew Fabian said he discovered in his evaluation of Ruiz — that his father was sent to prison for participating in the sexual assault and killing of a 15-year-old girl before Ruiz was born.
“Jose had the curse of a doublewhammy: nurture and nature,” Efron told the jury. “He was cursed by nature with horrific violence from a father he never met.”
His mother, Irene Ruiz, testified that she had three children as a teenager with the father who went to prison. She remarried and had four more, and her husband got hurt and could no longer work.
A sister also testified and said Ruiz “got it worse” than the rest of his siblings at the hands of the stepfather.
Efron did not excuse what happened to Mercedes.
“In a home that tended to normalize abuse, trauma, chaos and lack of attachment, these were things that were modeled early on,” she said.
The mitigating circumstances Efron described contained similarities to what Ruiz did to Mercedes in the weeks leading up to her death.
The defense witnesses said Ruiz was hospitalized for several months as a little boy after a severe beating from his stepfather. Every day, the same man would hit Ruiz on the top of his head with a cane or a shoe.
Ruiz suffered a concussion at 12 from those beatings, Efron told the jury, and since then has experienced neurological issues.
“It had an impact on his world view and ability to assess right or wrong,” she said. “No one intervened on his behalf, and it happened day after day after day. His message? It’s normal. No one’s doing anything about it.”
Prosecutor Marissa Giovenco wasn’t having it.
“Who doesn’t get a Chapter 2? Mercedes Losoya. She didn’t even get a Chapter 1,” Giovenco said.
A former prosecutor who initially handled the case, now a defense attorney in private practice, she was sworn in by Bexar County District Attorney Joe D. Gonzales to continue working it at trial.
Giovenco asked jurors to consider the life Mercedes did not get to live, and the torture and abuse.
She recalled Ruiz’s police interview in which he told detectives that he never would have subjected Mercedes to what they accused him of, because bad things were done to him as a child.
“Prior abuse is no excuse. Someone has to end the cycle,” Giovenco said. “I ask you not show him any mercy like he didn’t to Mercedes and sentence him to the maximum.”
Twelve minutes later, the jury did.
The victim impact statement on behalf of the paternal side of the child’s family, given by Valerie Rios, an aunt of Mercedes, shook many in the gallery.
Rios said the family lives daily with angst and grief that Mercedes was tortured for weeks. They felt “pure anger and disgust” at Ruiz, whom they saw grinning in the courtroom and who has never shown remorse for what he did, she said.
There were no kind words for Mendoza, either, because Mercedes had family members who wanted to adopt her and raise her as their own, Rios said.
“She just wanted to be loved by her mother,” Rios said, fighting back tears. “We tried everything in our legal power, reached out to authorities … we begged to care for Mercedes and Jordan.”
Ruiz will have to serve at least 30 years before he is eligible for parole.