Detective Mario Santana testified that he visited Fuentes in a local hospital later that day and that she confessed to luring her 11-year-old daughter Edith into the front room of the house by promising to play hide and seek. Santana said that Fuentes then admitted hitting the child on the head with a glass bottle, hoping to knock the girl out, so that Edith would not feel her mother slashing her throat.
The child did not lose consciousness, and instead pleaded with her mother, telling her mother she loved her, till Fuentes managed to slit the child’s throat, Santana said...
Later, in cross-examination, Fuentes’ public defender, Michael Gottlieb, painted Fuentes as a woman with severe mental problems who had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals for years...
A third daughter, age 14, survived. She was at a nearby library at the time of the slayings and is now under state protection. In testimony, Santana said Fuentes waited for her third daughter to leave the house because that daughter was larger than the other girls and feisty.
“I don’t doubt that she was depressed,” prosecutor Lisa Tanner told North Hollywood Patch. “But this was a cold, calculated act. She planned, prepared and wanted to take her life. She did not have the right to make that decision for her daughters."
