Jury Urges Life in Prison Without Parole for Father in Carbon Monoxide Deaths of 5 Children

A jury Monday recommended life in prison without possibility of parole for a Pico Rivera man who killed five of his children in 2002 by lighting a charcoal grill near the room where they slept.

Adair Javier Garcia, 33, was convicted last month in Los Angeles County Superior Court of first-degree murder in the deaths of three daughters and two sons.

“I’m not happy with life in prison,” said Arturo Arreola, the children’s uncle. “He doesn’t deserve to be on the face of the Earth.”

The five children died of carbon monoxide poisoning on the night of Feb. 19, 2002. Garcia and one of his daughters survived. He is scheduled to be sentenced June 8.

During the penalty phase of his trial, defense attorneys Patricia Mulligan and Jill Thomas portrayed Garcia as a doting father who spent most of his free time with his family. They declined to comment on the sentencing recommendation, which was reached by the jury of seven men and five women after a week of deliberation.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Victor Rodriguez painted a different portrait of the defendant, accusing Garcia of killing his children to spite his wife, Adriana Ibeth Arreola, who had left him a few weeks before the killings.

“This is a case where we felt the death penalty was the appropriate penalty,” Rodriguez said after the jury’s decision was announced, adding that he thought the jury was swayed by the testimony of Garcia’s father and his apparently remorseful state in jail.

On the night of the killings, Garcia put his children to sleep in his bed and lighted charcoal in the barbecue grill he had placed in the hallway, he admitted to Los Angeles County sheriff’s detectives in a videotaped interrogation that was played in court. He then lay down beside them, expecting the carbon monoxide to asphyxiate them all.

Adriana M. Arreola, the children’s maternal grandmother, learned of the killings the next morning when she arrived to take the children to school.

Autopsies showed that Brenda, 10; Jonathan, 7; and Anthony, 2, died at the scene. Cecilia, 4, died later that day and Vanessa, 6, died the following day. Garcia’s sixth child, Kassandra, 9 at the time, survived.

“The hurt is always going to be there all the time,” Adriana M. Arreola testified. “I don’t think anybody can help me. It’ll never go away.”