Guilty verdict Monday follows mistrial in May
September 20, 2010 1:09 PM
Jared Taylor
The Monitor
EDINBURG — It took jurors less than two hours Monday morning to convict an Edinburg welding shop owner’s widow of his 2008 murder.
Mirna Matiana Garcia received a 55-year prison sentence for the murder of her husband, Antonio.
The relatively rapid verdict was a shift from the first time prosecutors tried to send Garcia, 43, to prison in the case. In May, 23 hours of deliberation ended in a mistrial.
“They were able to decipher all the facts and all the evidence presented in front of them,” said Monica Barron-Auger, who helped prosecute the case in the 275th state District Court.
Edinburg police found Antonio Garcia, 47, dead in a pool of blood Nov. 21, 2008, in his office at The Cactus Iron Works.
His wife pointed to the Zetas drug cartel as the party responsible for Antonio’s murder, but investigators found her behavior suspicious.
When Garcia first arrived at the crime scene, she didn’t seem appropriately shocked at her husband’s slaying, and made sure to tell investigators that she was not at the business when her husband was shot, officers said at her initial trial.
She later admitted under questioning that she had asked a man with whom she had an affair to find someone to kill her husband.
Police arrested Garcia and the business’s foreman — Jose Manuel Gomez, 42 — three weeks after the fatal shooting, accusing them of killing Antonio Garcia so they could be together.
“It was a perfect scenario for the defendant,” Barron-Auger said. “She was able to have her lover run her husband’s business and it was just the perfect scenario that she had set up.”
Garcia stuck with her story about the organized crime hit. For years, Antonio Garcia had been involved in a side business that illegally bought oil from the Zetas from the pipelines of Mexico’s state-run oil monopoly before selling it to U.S. companies.
Ultimately, jurors were not convinced.
“The possibility that the Zetas could have been involved in this murder — it was just a story that the defendant and the codefendant just came up with to cover up their actions,” Barron-Auger said.
Prosecutor Ted Lopez worked with Barron-Auger on the Garcia case.
Mirna Garcia will become eligible for parole in 2037, just shy of her 70th birthday. Her defense lawyer, Michael J. Garza, could not be reached on his cell phone Monday evening.
A murder charge against Gomez remains pending. A pretrial hearing in his case is set for Oct. 4.
__
Jared Taylor covers courts, law enforcement and general assignments for The Monitor. You can reach him at (956) 683-4439.
No comments:
Post a Comment