{"id":130539,"date":"2026-01-12T19:19:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-12T19:19:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/130539\/"},"modified":"2026-01-12T19:19:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-12T19:19:08","slug":"man-gets-25-years-to-life-in-2019-murder-of-schoolteacher-mother-the-mercury-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/130539\/","title":{"rendered":"Man gets 25 years to life in 2019 murder of schoolteacher mother \u2013 The Mercury News"},"content":{"rendered":"

SAN JOSE \u2014 A man convicted of brutally murdering his schoolteacher mother<\/a> nearly seven years ago has been sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for a crime that devastated the family of the longtime East San Jose educator.<\/p>\n

\"RyanRyan Garner, left, was convicted of murder in the July 2019 killing of his mother, 57-year-old Cynthia Mykkanen, a longtime San Jose schoolteacher. Authorities say Garner, who had a history of assaulting the victim, took his seriously injured mother to an emergency room and purported that she had been attacked by a nonexistent boyfriend. (Photos courtesy of Mykkanen family and San Jose Police Dept.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ryan Garner, 42, again refused to be transported to court \u2014 as he did Dec. 8<\/a> \u2014 but his Monday sentencing by Judge Hanley Chew went on without him. Vanessa McCarthy, Garner\u2019s aunt and sister of victim Cynthia Mykkanen, addressed the absence in a victim impact statement.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m very disappointed that he wasn\u2019t forced to come,\u201d McCarthy said through a court video feed. \u201cWhat he\u2019s doing is he doesn\u2019t want to face us, the family.\u00a0There is no closure but there is justice.\u201d<\/p>\n

McCarthy, following other family members and longtime friends who gave victim statements at the December hearing, was unsparing in excoriating Garner, emphasizing how diminutive and defenseless Mykkanen was against a vicious July 2019 assault that authorities say entailed Garner slamming his mother\u2019s head into a wall.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re a disgusting human being, and I use \u2018human being\u2019 loosely,\u201d McCarthy said. \u201cYou slaughtered \u2026 you tortured the one person who loved you unconditionally.\u201d<\/p>\n

Garner will receive credit for the six and a half years he has spent in jail since being arrested for the killing; he could be eligible for parole around 2041 after accounting for his time served. That does not equate to his likely release; a parole board typically would have to find that he has rehabilitated and shown remorse, and Mykkanen\u2019s family remarked on several occasions how Garner appeared remorseless during his trial, which ended with a jury conviction in September \u2014 after less than an hour of deliberation.<\/p>\n

\u201cRyan Garner brutally murdered Cynthia Mykkanen, a beloved sister, teacher, and friend. While no punishment can bring Cynthia back or undo her family\u2019s pain, today\u2019s sentence hopefully delivers to them a measure of justice,\u201d Deputy District Attorney Carolyn Malinsky told this news organization after the sentencing. \u201cSuch cruelty as Mr. Garner displayed has no place in our community and will be held accountable under the law.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mykkanen, 57, a Virginia native and San Jose State University alumna, was a well regarded teacher at Painter Elementary School in the Alum Rock Union School District, and also taught at Harry Slonaker Academy. In 2017, she was featured by The Mercury News<\/a>\u00a0for her work with the Youth Science Institute and its camps and field trips for grade-school children.<\/p>\n

Several months before the killing, Garner was arrested and convicted of assault and false imprisonment for violently attacking Mykkanen, including choking her and threatening to kill her. Garner pleaded no contest to the charges, was sentenced to time served, and was placed on three years of probation supervision, which was still active when he killed Mykkanen.<\/p>\n

According to San Jose police investigators, on the afternoon of July 18, 2019, officers were called to Regional Medical Center after a security guard told them that a man brought Mykkanen to the emergency room and claimed she had been beaten by her unnamed boyfriend, and that the man \u201cappeared to be intoxicated\u201d before driving away in a truck rented by his mother. Police later determined Mykkanen did not have a boyfriend.<\/p>\n

At the hospital, Mykkanen was unresponsive and exhibited visible injuries to her face and head, showed no signs of brain activity, and was placed on life support.\u00a0Investigators went to the San Jose apartment where Mykkanen lived with Garner and discovered a bloody crime scene and signs that the victim\u2019s head had been slammed into a wall.<\/p>\n

A landscaper reported seeing Mykkanen try to leave her apartment before someone pulled her back inside.\u00a0Detectives obtained security video showing Garner carrying Mykkanen into the pickup truck. Garner was arrested later that night in South San Jose, and was initially booked on suspicion of attempted murder, a charge that was elevated to murder when Mykkannen died four days later.<\/p>\n

At the end of her remarks Monday, McCarthy told the court that Mykkanen\u2019s family has disowned Garner.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you killed Cindy, you killed a part of me too,\u201d she said. \u201c(But) we are united in eternal love for Cindy.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SAN JOSE \u2014 A man convicted of brutally murdering his schoolteacher mother nearly seven years ago has been…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":86656,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[1312,7359,1331,48626,2901,67093,88,90,89,198,10384],"class_list":["post-130539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-jose","tag-courts","tag-district-attorney","tag-murder","tag-mykkanen","tag-prison","tag-ryan-garner","tag-san-jose","tag-san-jose-headlines","tag-san-jose-news","tag-santa-clara-county","tag-teacher"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130539"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130539\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/86656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}