A 47-year-old man pleaded not guilty Thursday in connection with a fireworks accident last Fourth of July in Buena Park that killed an 8-year-old girl.<\/p>\n
Jasmine Nguyen of Anaheim was at the home of Earl Decastro along with her mother and 7-year-old sister for a party in the 8000 block of Cornflower Circle, near the intersection of La Palma and Stanton avenues, prosecutors said.<\/p>\n
Bail was set at $50,000 for Decastro, who is next due in court Sept. 11 for a pretrial hearing in the North Justice Center in Fullerton.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis was a terrible accident and a beautiful young girl lost her life, and my client is devastated,\u201d Decastro\u2019s attorney, Jeff Kent, told City News Service.<\/p>\n
Decastro is accused of igniting fireworks in front of his home for more than an hour before setting off an illegal $400 firework in the shape of a cake as a \u201cgrand finale,\u201d prosecutors said.<\/p>\n
The firework \u201cmalfunctioned\u201d and exploded aerial mortar shells into the driveway, where his guests were watching the display, prosecutors said.<\/p>\n
As some of his guests dashed into Decastro\u2019s home to escape the mortars, a stash of fireworks near Jasmine exploded, prosecutors said. Jasmine was rushed to UCI Medical Center, where she was later pronounced dead.<\/p>\n
Decastro was charged with involuntary manslaughter, unlawfully causing a fire with great bodily injury and possessing dangerous fireworks in excess of 100 pounds, all felonies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A 47-year-old man pleaded not guilty Thursday in connection with a fireworks accident last Fourth of July in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":28494,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[13856,163,165,164,10688,158,4035,4164,1833,4165],"class_list":["post-391341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anaheim","tag-accident","tag-anaheim","tag-anaheim-headlines","tag-anaheim-news","tag-buena","tag-deadly","tag-fireworks","tag-guilty","tag-park","tag-pleads"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391341","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=391341"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391341\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=391341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=391341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=391341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}