An El Sereno man pleaded no contest Thursday to second-degree murder in connection with his 15-month-old son’s death just over 4 1/2 years ago.
Jose Juan Herrera, now 38, was immediately sentenced to 15 years to life in state prison, according to Assistant Head Deputy District Attorney Jonathan Hatami.
The plea was entered in a downtown Los Angeles courtroom hours after a Jan. 29 trial date was set for Herrera.
At a hearing last year in which Herrera was ordered to stand trial, Hatami told a judge that the prosecution believed that Herrera grabbed, strangled and shook his son, Gael, while the two were home alone.
An autopsy determined that the toddler died from a traumatic head injury, with Deputy Medical Examiner Lawrence Nguyen concluding that it was a homicide and that injuries to the boy’s body indicated “inflicted trauma.”
The boy’s mother, Noemi Medina, pleaded no contest in November 2023 to a felony child abuse charge and was sentenced to four years in state prison for violating an order barring Herrera from having access to the child, Hatami said.
Medina had regained custody of the boy and his two older half-sisters about a month before the toddler’s death, but subsequently admitted in an interview with police that she had violated an order to keep Herrera away from the children, Los Angeles Police Department Detective Jesse Oropeza testified at the March 2024 hearing.
Herrera admitted during a May 2021 interview that he had been left alone with the boy in the apartment in the 4600 block of Valley Boulevard, about one mile east of Soto Street, for a period of time and that he had been living with the boy’s mother since February 2021, the detective testified.
One of the boy’s half-sisters told an investigator that Herrera was “mean” and described incidents in which he had thrown items at the boy’s head, Oropeza said.
A subsequent search of a phone identified by Herrera as belonging to him showed that searches had been done involving topics including how to get murder charges reduced in California, how to fight child endangerment charges and when parents are liable in a child’s accidental death, the detective testified.
The boy’s uncle, Gustavo Medina, testified that he and his parents had taken care of the toddler after he was initially placed into foster care with another family, and described Gael as the happiest that he had ever been.
“When she (Noemi Medina) would bring him around, we would see bruises on him,” he testified.
Nurse practitioner Melissa Valenzuela, who saw a collection of bruises on the boy during a scheduled appointment shortly before his death, testified that the visit “bothered me a lot.”
She said the boy’s mother “seemed not very emotionally attached to the child” and “wasn’t like a typical mother” when the child wanted to be consoled by her during the office visit.
Dr. Maria Lopez-Patel, who had been the boy’s pediatrician since he was two months old, testified that she determined on his last office visit that he had lost weight and had multiple bruises that led her to suspect abuse.
A neighbor, Jasmine Aguirre, testified that she called 911 after hearing noises and saw a man holding a toddler who wasn’t breathing come up to her door. She testified that he subsequently returned and told her not to say anything.
The victim’s uncle identified Herrera as the man seen on a Ring video outside the woman’s apartment.
Dr. Kate Barklow, a supervising pediatrics doctor at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center now known as Los Angeles General Medical Center, described the boy as suffering from a “traumatic brain injury” and multiple bruises when he was rushed to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Herrera was arrested in December 2022 by Los Angeles police and has remained behind bars since then, jail records show.