Mexico extradites man in 1990 slaying
A 56-year-old man was extradited to the United States from Mexico to face charges in the brutal 1990 murder of a 14-yearold Salinas girl, authorities said Monday.
Arsenio Pacheco Leyva sat in a Mexican jail cell for more than three years, fighting a request to be turned over to U.S. authorities, before returning to Monterey County last week, said Cameron Rogers Polan, a spokeswoman for the FBI.
Leyva was booked Thursday at the Monterey County Jail on suspicion of murder, assault with the intent to commit rape and attempted kidnapping. He is being held in lieu of $5 million bail.
His extradition comes nearly three decades after Christy Piña was found dead Feb. 8, 1990, in an artichoke field just off Highway 1 in Castroville. Piña was strangled with a cloth, raped and stabbed repeatedly, said Monterey County Sheriff Steve Bernal.
“Christy was the victim of a senseless, brutal murder,” Bernal said at a news conference Monday.
Shortly after the slaying, the Sheriff ’s Office received tips that pointed to Leyva as the killer, Bernal said, but none of the tips went anywhere.
Early DNA analysis of the crime scene led investigators to believe that there was a one-in-300 chance that Leyva was the suspect, Bernal said. That wasn’t good enough, though, to prosecute.
It wasn’t until 1996, with the advancement of DNA technology, that Leyva was found to be a match with a “probability of one in three billion” that he wasn’t the suspect, Bernal said. By that time, however, Leyva had gone into hiding, and authorities in 2007 learned he was in Mexico.
“Over the next several years, detectives followed leads that Leyva might be visiting family” in Monterey County, Bernal said, though he never came.
U.S. authorities coordinated with Mexican officials, who arrested Leyva after years of challenges to the extradition.
“For the last three and a half years, detectives … worked tirelessly with our partner agencies to bring Arsenio Leyva back to Monterey County to finally face these charges,” Bernal said.