ISABEL GARCIA - 2 yo (2008) - Pomona CA

POMONA - A couple accused
of neglecting their 2-year-old daughter and allowing her to starve to
death were sentenced to prison Thursday after pleading no contest to
child abuse. Lupe Lopez and Gabriel Garcia, both 29, had been charged with
murder for the death of Isabel Garcia, who weighed only 19 pounds when
she died on May 19, 2008. The Pomona couple reached plea agreements with prosecutors Thursday in which murder charges were dropped.
Lopez was sentenced to 12 years, 8 months in prison after pleading no contest
to three counts of child abuse and admitting to a special allegation
that her actions caused her daughter's death. Her conviction carries a
strike as part of the state's three-strikes law. Garcia pleaded guilty to one count of child abuse and was
sentenced to six years in prison. He had been jailed on unrelated
charges for nearly three weeks when his daughter was found dead. Two days after Isabel's birth on March 29, 2006, she was placed in foster care because of concerns about possible neglect and
her father's drug use, authorities said. Garcia's foster mother, Ludivina Ramirez, testified at a
preliminary hearing that the toddler was healthy when she cared for
her, weighing 20 pounds when she was 1. When the child was 15 months old, she returned to live with
her parents at a Holt Avenue mobile home park. Eleven months later, she
was dead. An autopsy found that the cause of death was malnutrition.
There were bruises and
cuts on the girl's body as well as injuries to the toes, a Pomona
police detective testified at a preliminary hearing. Lopez and Garcia denied trying to harm the girl in interviews with police investigators, the detective testified.
Lopez and Garcia, wearing jail scrubs, listened in court on Thursday as a
prosecutor read a statement written by their dead daughter's former
foster parents. The foster parents, who now care for Lopez and Garcia's five other children, expressed shock at Isabel's death.
"It is baffling how any feeling adult - much less two parents - could watch
their child waste away," the couple said in the statement.