Monday was an emotionally charged day for the relatives of Gabriel Fernandez, the 8-year-old boy who was brutally tortured to death by his mother, Pearl Fernandez, and her boyfriend in the worst child abuse case the presiding judge said he’d ever seen.
Two of Gabriel’s cousins spoke at a Los Angeles Superior Court hearing to demand that the mother’s resentencing petition be denied.
Judge George G. Lomeli indeed rejected Fernandez’s request, and by 9 a.m., they were able to breathe a sigh of relief knowing that the woman who starved her son, forced him to sleep handcuffed in a wooden drawer and broke his teeth with a baseball bat would remain behind bars.
Fernandez’s boyfriend, Isauro Aguirre, was sentenced to death in 2018, and his automatic appeal petition is currently pending in California Supreme Court.
“They should spend the rest of their life in prison for what they did to little Gabriel,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Jonathan Hatami, who prosecuted the case against them. “He didn’t do anything wrong. He just wanted them to love him, and they tortured and murdered him.”
Monday marked the second time Pearl Fernandez used a recent California law to challenge her sentence of life in prison without parole for her 2018 murder conviction. Though Lomeli denied both her 2021 and 2026 petitions, she is allowed to continue filing similar requests in the future, a notion that is deeply unsettling for Gabriel’s relatives.
“My frustration is because of the family,” Hatami told The Times on Monday. “This opens up wounds, they’ve got to come to court, they’re afraid that the judge may let this person out. This anxiety and stress can break you down.”
Gabriel’s cousins Olivia Rubio and Emily Carranza spoke to reporters about their frustrations and fears outside the courtroom.
“All we want [is for] this to be over. We do need closure,” Rubio said. “It’s been a hard time, but she’s not going to stop, and that’s why our voices need to get louder.”
Hatami said its highly unlikely that Fernandez’s resentencing petition would be successful should she choose to bring it forward under the same judge again, but noted that is possible a different judge could be assigned to the case down the line who could interpret the law differently.
Fernandez and Aguirre were convicted of torturing Gabriel in their Palmdale apartment starting in October 2012, when he was 7 years old, and culminating in his death in May 2013.
In court, his siblings testified that Gabriel had been beaten with a wooden club and a broomstick, and tortured with pepper spray, Icy Hot, a metal hanger, a belt, lighters and BB guns, among other objects. He was forced to eat cat litter, cat feces, urine, vomit and rotten spinach, according to court documents.
When he arrived in the emergency room after being beaten unconscious in May 2013, he had injuries on nearly every area of his body including BBs embedded in his face, chest and groin; cuts and scars on his penis; a skull fracture; multiple broken ribs; and open wounds on his shins and feet.
Fernandez signed a guilty plea to life without the possibility of parole but later filed a resentencing petition, arguing that she was coerced into the plea and that her state-appointed defense attorney provided ineffective counsel. She claimed that she was mistakenly under the impression that her case would then be sent to appeal and noted that she has the documented verbal comprehension of a second-grader.
Fernandez was able to seek to overturn her conviction using Senate Bill 1437, a law that took effect in 2019 and allows people to seek resentencing if they were convicted of felony murder or under the natural and probable consequences doctrine.
Under these two legal theories, which have been significantly narrowed under California law, people could be convicted of murder even without intent to kill — either because a death occurred during the commission of a felony or because a killing was deemed a foreseeable result of a crime they aided.
These rules were often used to convict multiple gang members of murder when a person died during a crime committed by the group, explained Hatami. As a result, groups of teens and young adults could get life sentences even if only one of them pulled the trigger of a murder weapon.
SB 1437 has allowed some of these gang convictions to be overturned — but it has also paved the way for certain child abuse murder convictions to be challenged.
“Many times we charge a mom under natural and probable consequences,” said Hatami, “saying you have a legal duty to protect this child and allowed somebody else to torture and murder your child, therefore you’re also guilty of murder.”
In arguing against the resentencing petition, Hatami said that SB 1437 does not apply to Fernandez as she did not merely allow her boyfriend to abuse Gabriel but was a direct participant in the torture herself.
“The torture and murder of Gabriel was never a case of felony murder or natural and probable consequences,” he wrote in his opposition. “It was not pled that way, it was not presented that way, and it was not tried that way.”
Although Hatami understands the reasoning behind SB 1437, he believes the law should be amended to exempt child abuse cases. He also thinks there should be stricter limits on how many times SB 1437 can be used to challenge a conviction, noting that each time a resentencing petition is filed, it takes a toll on the victim’s relatives.
“I feel mad and upset that they have to relive this again,” he said. “It’s unfair to them.”
City News Service contributed to this report.
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