Jesse Manuel Figueroa<\/a>, 36, was babysitting 8-month-old Raina when he took the child to a Mountain View fire station on July 4, 2020, according to the Santa Clara County District Attorney\u2019s Office.<\/p>\nFigueroa told police he was taking her to a family barbecue when she mysteriously fell unconscious and blood began seeping from her nose, prosecutors said.<\/p>\n
She was taken to Lucile Packard Children\u2019s Hospital Stanford where a bruise developed on the child\u2019s left cheek \u201cin the distinctive shape and size of an adult hand,\u201d according to prosecutors.<\/p>\n
An autopsy found that the blow caused her brain to shift inside her skull and ruled her death a homicide, prosecutors said.<\/p>\n
\u201cRaina would have been 6 years old today instead of a name on a murder case,\u201d District Attorney Jeff Rosen said in a press release. \u201cThese cases break our hearts, at the brutality, at the senselessness, at the sheer loss of an innocent child.\u201d<\/p>\n
Evidence at his trial showed that Figueroa had repeatedly beaten and strangled his girlfriend, Raina\u2019s mother, and abused their other two children, ages 2 and 3, including by forcing them to kneel on rice, prosecutors said.<\/p>\n
At the time of the murder, he was under a restraining order that prohibited him from having any unsupervised visits with Raina, the District Attorney\u2019s Office said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe baby\u2019s grandfather wrote in an impact statement: \u2018Raina mattered. Her life mattered. 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,’\u201d prosecutors said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A San Jose man was sentenced to 25 years-to-life in prison Friday for killing his infant daughter by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":339806,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[733,723,134,734,88,90,89,198,52239],"class_list":["post-339805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-jose","tag-child-abuse","tag-crime","tag-homicide","tag-law-enforcement","tag-san-jose","tag-san-jose-headlines","tag-san-jose-news","tag-santa-clara-county","tag-santa-clara-county-district-attorneys-office"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339805","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=339805"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339805\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/339806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=339805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=339805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=339805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}