Parole Board: Convicted murderer to remain incarcerated
A California State Prison, Solano inmate incarcerated for the 1992 murder of his estranged wife in Vacaville has been denied parole, again.
Paul Estrada, serving a life sentence for second degree murder and use of a deadly weapon, will remain incarcerated, the Board of Parole Hearings determined Wednesday.
On the morning of May 27, 1992, Estrada violated a restraining order and entered his wife's home, advised the Solano County District Attorney's Office in a press statement. He broke a kitchen window, crept upstairs to the master bedroom where his wife, Ann Michelle (Garay) Estrada, and their son, who turned two that day, were sleeping. He fractured her skull with a hand weight and stabbed her in the heart before fleeing with his son to Marine World, the DA's Office said. The child was later released to a family friend.
On April 5, 1993, Estrada was sentenced to 16 years to life in prison for the murder. At his first parole hearing in 2006, he was denied. Next eligible for parole in 2010, he was denied for another 10 years.
In 2018, the parole board again denied him for 10 years. In 2022, he successfully petitioned to advance his next parole hearing date and was scheduled for 2023.
On Wednesday, Senior Deputy District Attorney Chris Pedersen and eight of Ann Michelle's family members attended the hearing. The voices of six family members swayed the Parole Board commissioner, according to the press statement, who “stated that Inmate Estrada has not internalized his guilt and the reasons behind his hideous crime and denied release for another 7 years finding that he continues to represent an unreasonable risk to safety of the community.”
Following the hearing, Pedersen explained his stance.
“While Mr. Estrada tried to show the Parole Board that he has taken classes, read books, etc., in order to understand his motivations for his crime, it was clear to me that he had just `gone through the motions', and hadn't truly accepted the gravity and inexcusable nature of what he did to Michelle and her family,” Petersen noted in the statement. “I agree wholeheartedly with the Board in its finding that he remains an unreasonable risk to the community if released and I believe justice was served.”