EDDIE "Nanito" SALAZAR - 8 months (2010) - Carthage MO

The Joplin Globe, Joplin, MO

May 14, 2011
Continuance OK’d in murder case involving baby
A continuance has been granted in the trial of a Carthage man for the alleged murder of his 8-month-old son.

The second-degree murder trial of Eddie A. Salazar, 30, was scheduled to start Monday in Jasper County Circuit Court in Joplin.

A continuance was granted this week by Circuit Judge Gayle Crane at the request of Salazar’s public defender, Maleia Cheney.
The judge has set a hearing for June 6 to determine a new trial date and hear any additional motions in the case.

The defendant is accused of killing his son, Eddie A. Salazar Jr., the night of Feb. 4-5, 2010, and disposing of the baby’s body in the Spring River east of Carthage. The father initially told police that masked men entered his family’s home and abducted the child in the middle of the night.
http://www.joplinglobe.com/crime_and_courts/x616689451/Continuance-OK-d-in-murder-case-involving-baby/print

06/06/2011	Docket Entry:	Hearing Held
Text:		Defendant appears not though in custody but by attorney Larry Maples. State appears by Norman Rouse, APA. Case set for trial the week of November 14, 2011. If not tried that date, then set for January 23, 2012. Motions set for August 29, 2011 at 9:00 a.m. So Ordered. Gayle L. Crane, Circuit Judge.
Associated Docket Entries:		05/13/2011 - Criminal Motion Hearing Sched
Associated Events:		06/06/2011 , 09:00:00 - Criminal Motion Hearing

https://www.courts.mo.gov/casenet/cases/searchDockets.do

August 8, 2011
Defense motion denied in baby-murder case
By Jeff Lehr
news@joplinglobe.com

JOPLIN, Mo. — A judge denied a motion Monday by the attorney for Eddie Salazar Sr. seeking records related to a polygraph examination of Salazar that was conducted while his 8-month-old son was still missing and presumed kidnapped.

The polygraph exam was administered to Salazar, 30, by the Missouri State Highway Patrol on Feb. 5, 2010, about 15 hours after Salazar reported that his son was abducted by one or two masked men he said had broken into their home in Carthage late at night.

The body of the baby boy, who shared his father’s name, was discovered the next day along the edge of Spring River east of Carthage, and his father was charged with second-degree murder.

Public defender Larry Maples stated in a motion filed July 6 that his client was told after the polygraph exam that he failed the test, and that the state maintains that Salazar then made certain incriminating statements. Maples wrote in his motion that the defense should be entitled to a copy of all polygraph records and to have an expert examine them.

Circuit Judge Gayle Crane disagreed and denied the motion after listening to arguments at a hearing Monday in Jasper County Circuit Court. Polygraph exams are deemed inadmissible in Missouri state courts, and the test results obtained during the investigation of the child’s death will not be presented at trial.

The polygraph test was a subject of a previous defense motion to suppress evidence as well as the motion that was denied Monday. The earlier motion questioned whether Salazar had knowingly and voluntarily waived his right to counsel during interviews with investigators after the disappearance of his son, and whether the length and character of his detention should render statements obtained from him by investigators involuntarily.

That motion had been denied by the judge in January.

Assistant prosecutor Norman Rouse’s suggestions in opposition to the defense’s motion to suppress evidence stated that Salazar was not in custody and was voluntarily answering questions for the first three hours and 52 minutes of questioning, during which time the focus of investigators remained on identification of the men who reportedly had abducted his child.

Consequently, Salazar was not informed of his Miranda rights until he happened to let investigators know that he was on parole for armed robbery, and further investigation suggested that the crime scene may have been staged, according to the prosecutor.

After the initial period of questioning and before he made any incriminating statements, Salazar was taken to a motel room and allowed to sleep, according to the prosecutor. He was contacted again at the motel late that morning and questioned a second time. During that questioning, he told police that the abductor was a man named “Juan Mendoza,” according to the prosecutor.

The defendant then was taken to lunch and was asked to accompany investigators to Springfield for the purpose of submitting to a lie detector test, which he agreed to do. The test took four hours once they got there, according to the document.

Afterward, the prosecutor wrote, Salazar was informed that he had failed the test and that police had contacted Mendoza, who denied Salazar’s accusation and provided a verifiable alibi. He also was told that an interlock device on his vehicle showed that it was driven farther than the trip around the block that he told investigators he had made.

The prosecutor’s document states: “At that point in time, the defendant confessed to causing the death of his child and disposing of the body in the woods next to a river.”





Trial dates



POSSIBLE TRIAL DATES for Eddie Salazar Sr. remain scheduled for Nov. 14 of this year or Jan. 23, 2012.

http://www.joplinglobe.com/local/x1533022671/Defense-motion-denied-in-baby-murder-case

Trial Delayed Again for Missouri Man Accused of Killing Son

Monday, November 14 2011

(Carthage, MO) -- The trial has been delayed for the father of 8-month-old Eddie Salazar, Junior.

The baby's body was found in the Spring River in February 2010. Eddie Salazar, Senior is charged with Second Degree Murder.

He first reported the boy was kidnapped, but later Eddie Salazar, Junior was found in a river.

The Carthage Press reports a Jasper County judge has granted another coninuance and scheduled the trial for January 23, 2012.

This is the third time the trial has been delayed.

http://ozarksfirst.com/fulltext?nxd_id=554417

JOPLIN, Mo. —
A Jasper County jury will be asked to decide whether the Carthage
father of an 8-month-old boy should be convicted of second-degree murder
or acquitted of an accident in the baby’s 2010 death.

Trial opened Monday in Jasper County Circuit Court in Joplin for Eddie
Salazar Sr., 31, in the Feb. 4, 2010, death of infant Eddie Salazar Jr.

Prosecutor Dean Dankelson told jurors Monday afternoon in opening
statements that Salazar gave investigators four different stories as to
what happened to the baby after first calling 9-1-1 shortly after 11
p.m. saying he had fended off a home invasion by two men and that one of
his children was missing.

Dankelson played the tape recording of that call in which Salazar in a
calm voice told a dispatcher: “Someone broke into my house while I was
asleep. I can’t find my little son.”

Salazar first told the dispatcher he was asleep on the couch when two
men broke in and assaulted him. He must have been knocked unconscious,
he said, because “I don’t know what happened.”

Officers who went to his house found furniture topped and an overturned
crib where the baby was said to have been put to bed that night.
Salazar had scratches on his face and back.

Investigators noted his demeanor, the prosecutor said: “He was
coherent. He was not crying. He did not offer to look for the child.”

Officers spoke with Salazar at length over the next 24 hours before
Salazar admitted there was no intrusion and abduction. He then told
investigators that the baby and his girlfriend’s toddler son were
playing on a couch, and that the baby fell off and hit his head. Salazar
said he comforted the boy, changed his diaper, and put him to bed but
found later the baby was not breathing. He said he loaded the children
in the car and drove out into the country, ended up at Spring River,
where he laid the boy in the woods. When he came home, he was upset, and
kicked in the door and toppled the furniture in disappointment.

He gave authorities at least two more versions of his trip to the
river. In the last version, he said he threw the boy’s body off the
bridge.

More than 36 hours passed when a law enforcement officer found the
baby’s body snagged in a tree floating in the freezing river.

The cause of death was ruled as blunt force trauma to the head. A
medical examiner reported that the infant suffered three fractures to
the back of the head. He finally admitted to officers that the boys had
been playing, the baby started crying, and that he had become frustrated
and shook the baby. He told investigators the baby’s head was hit as he
shook him.

Public defender Larry Maples told the jury that the evidence will show
that officers questioned Salazar several times until one of them said
the father’s intruder story did not add up and that he believed there
had been an accident.

Salazar eventually admitted he had not told the true story of the boy’s
death. “He didn’t think anybody was going to believe him,” Maples told
the jury. “He was scared.

“He explained that yes, he had become frustrated with little Eddie Jr.
He was holding him and trying to comfort him, and then he shook him. But
this is not a shaken-baby case.”

Salazar denied throwing the baby, but finally told investigators that
he was shaking the boy, realized he should not have been shaking him,
loosened his grip and the baby flew out of his hands and hit the floor,
covered in ceramic tile.

Maples said the jury will hear Salazar’s tearful admission and his
denials that he threw the boy to floor in anger. There will be testimony
that the injuries the baby suffered were consistent with a fall to the
floor, to the hard floor, Maples said. He said he will ask the jury to
reject a conviction of second-degree murder .

Trial to continue

Testimony will start at 9 a.m. today in Division No. 1 of circuit court in the Jasper County Courts Building in Joplin.

http://www.joplinglobe.com/topstories/x1690516062/Salazar-trial-opens

Snipped from above article. I hope the Judge and Jury get this right. For crying out loud, it sounds like first degree murder to me. But if they are only charging him with 2nd degree then he should get that with a life sentence. What a freakin liar. He killed this baby and I hope he pays for it:

"A Jasper County jury will be asked to decide whether the Carthage
father of an 8-month-old boy should be convicted of second-degree murder or acquitted of an accident in the baby’s 2010 death."

A judge sentenced Eddie Salazar to life in prison Monday in the death of
the infant son who bore his name, although the baby’s grandmother
suggested that the father’s own conscience may provide the most fitting
form of punishment.

“I never thought my daughter and my grandchildren were living with a
murderer,” Adela Guzman told the court during victim-impact statements
at the father’s sentencing hearing in Jasper County Circuit Court in
Joplin.

Salazar, 31, was convicted by a jury in March of second-degree murder
in the death of 8-month-old Eddie Salazar Jr. on Feb. 4, 2010, at their
home in Carthage.

Guzman told the court that she did not know how to begin to express
“the sadness and emptiness” she has in her heart over the loss of her
grandson.

“He was just a baby,” she said. “Eddie did not give him the chance to even say the word ‘Mama.’”

She said that as a consequence, the father has no right to be free any longer.

“Whatever punishment you give him is not sufficient,” Guzman told Circuit Judge Gayle Crane.

Guzman said the best or most fitting punishment may be come from
Salazar’s own conscience, which should serve to remind him every day for
the rest of his life that he was the killer of his own son.

Although Salazar did appear to shed a tear at one point in the hearing,
the defendant did not show much emotion as his son’s mother and
grandmother read victim-impact statements to the court in Spanish that
were translated into English by an interpreter.

Yadira Aguilar, the mother of the boy, said the death of her baby
changed the lives of all the members of her family. She said her baby
“did not deserve to die that way.” She said his father “did not have the
right to rip my baby from my arms, and I want him to pay for what he
did.”

She was at work the night the child was killed inside their home at 227
Mound St. in Carthage. The defendant was taking care of the baby and
his 2-year-old stepbrother, Aguilar’s child from another relationship.

“I left my babies with their dad,” she said. “I thought that they were in good hands. But I was wrong.”

She said she still cannot understand why Salazar did what he did to
their son, who was “defenseless.” She expressed further dismay with how
he could then take the child’s body and throw him in Spring River.

“Every night I ask myself the same question: Why did he do it?” Aguilar said.

According to testimony at the trial, the baby died of blunt force trauma to the head.

Salazar’s public defender, Larry Maples, called two witnesses on his
client’s behalf at the hearing: his sister, Maria Salazar, and a male
friend since high school. They told the court that Salazar had been a
good father to both the boys.

“If the baby needed a diaper change, he was there,” the sister testified. “If the baby needed a bottle, he was there.”

Before the testimony of any witnesses, Maples presented motions for the
acquittal of his client or, in the alternative, a new trial. He argued
that references made by the prosecutors during jury selection and the
trial to the defendant not testifying were cause for a mistrial, and
that references to the defendant’s prior criminal record made by
investigators in videotaped interviews played at the trial prejudiced
jurors against his client. The judge overruled the motions for acquittal
or a new trial.

A conviction for second-degree murder carries from 10 to 30 years, or
up to life, in prison in Missouri. Maples argued at the hearing for a
sentence of 20 to 25 years, while the prosecutor’s office sought a life
term.





Unhappy client



NEAR THE END of his sentencing hearing Monday, Eddie Salazar expressed
dissatisfaction with the counsel he had received from public defender
Larry Maples, but he failed to convince the judge that he had received
ineffective assistance of counsel.

SALAZAR HAD COMPLAINED to the judge in a letter in November of last
year about several matters concerning police conduct in the case.

http://www.joplinglobe.com/local/x474408317/Eddie-Salazar-draws-life-term-in-infant-son-s-death

Guzman said the best or most fitting punishment may be come from Salazar’s own conscience, which should serve to remind him every day for the rest of his life that he was the killer of his own son.

This man doesn't have a conscience and his only regret is getting caught and spending the rest of his life in prison.

He probably blames the poor murdered baby for his sorry lot in life.