SANTA CLARA COUNTY, CA - A father in his thirties struck his infant daughter so hard in the face that it "caused her brain to dislodge and move to a different part of her head" and left a bruise in the "distinctive shape and size of an adult hand" on her cheek, killing her.
The father, 36-year-old Jesse Manuel Figueroa, was sentenced to 25 years to life for the death of his eight-month-old daughter Raina, the Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office said in a statement. A jury of his peers convicted him of murder earlier this year, Law & Crime reported.
Figueroa brought his unconscious daughter to a Mountain View fire station on July 4, 2020. Firefighters rushed her to the hospital, where she died just a few days later. At the time, the father claimed he was taking her to a family barbecue when she "mysteriously fell unconscious and blood began seeping from her nose."
However, while the baby girl was at the hospital, a bruise developed in the shape of an adult hand on Raina's cheek. An autopsy later confirmed that she died from blunt force trauma that caused brain hemorrhaging.
"The medical examiner revealed the blow to Raina 'was so hard it caused her brain to dislodge and move to a different part of her head,'" prosecutors wrote. As the investigation into the incident progressed, detectives learned that Figueroa was also abusive toward Raina's mother and their two other children, ages two and three.
He strangled Raina's mother and forced the children to kneel on rice, prosecutors said. Figueroa was not allowed to have unsupervised visits with Raina, but he convinced the mother to allow him to watch the little girl alone so he could take her to the family barbecue.
"Raina mattered. Her life mattered," Raina's grandfather told the court in a victim impact statement. "She was not just a name in a case file. She was a baby who was deeply loved and who should still be here today."
During the sentencing, District Attorney Jeff Rosen noted that Raina would be six years old if she were alive today. "These cases break our hearts, at the brutality, at the senselessness, at the sheer loss of an innocent child," Rosen said in a statement. "Today, we can only feel some sense of justice that this man will never hurt another child."
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