A judge who called two teenage girls "child monsters" handed over the stiffest prison sentences ever given for a Riverside County homicide when the killers were juveniles.
Last week, Dayana Cordova and Anna Salinas were convicted of murdering Angelina Arias, a twenty year old Lake Elsinore mother. Arias had befriended the two girls at a restaurant where she had worked as a waitress. But when Arias offered Cordova and Salinas a ride home, the two decided to kill Arias so they could take her car and go to the Knott's Berry Farm theme park. They drove away with Arias's 9-month-old daughter, who was in the car at the time of the murder, and later abandoned the baby on the porch of a house in Perris, CA.
Cordova was 16 years old when the crime occurred in October 2007. Salinas was 15. They were both convicted of first-degree murder, carjacking, kidnapping and child endangerment. The sentencing took place on Friday December 11 at the Southwest Justice Center in French Valley.
Both Cordova and Salinas were tried and convicted as adults. Cordova, now 18, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Salinas, who pulled the trigger and shot Arias, is now 17 years old. She was sentenced to 59 years, four months, to life in prison. Because she was only 15 at the time of the shooting, she was not eligible for life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Perhaps the two girls wouldn't have been given as harsh a punishment, if they had access to skilled Los Angeles criminal defense attorneys. They could be regretting their actions for the rest of their lives.
- Judge Sentences Teenage Girls (The Pree-Enterprise)
- Girls Who Killed Woman Get Lengthy Sentence (Los Angeles Times)
- Murder: First Degree (FindLaw)
