A Los Angeles mother who sedated her 11-year-old special-needs son and hid him in a closet where he withered to 34 pounds — the weight of a 3-year-old — before dying has been sentenced to 25 years to life in state prison.
Veronica Aguilar learned her fate on Friday after she pleaded no contest to charges of assault on a child, causing the death of her son, Yonatan Daniel Aguilar.
“These cases are so tragic,” Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Larry Paul Fidler said, noting the “terror and fear” he must have gone through, City News Service reported.
Retired Los Angeles Police Detective Moses Castillo told the judge he believed the boy would say two things to his mother, “I love you” and “I forgive you.”
Veronica Aguilar was sentenced in the death of her son, Yonatan Daniel Aguilar. (Aguilar’s mug shot and memorial screenshot from Los Angeles’ ABC7 News/YouTube)
Yonatan was “an innocent child whose life was tragically and unjustly cut short by the years of neglect and abuse at the hands of his mother,” LA County Deputy District Attorney Alexander Bott said after the hearing, the wire service reported.
The plea, the prosecutor added, “represents a significant and appropriate outcome reflective of the gravity of the crime committed.”
In an earlier court hearing, a detective testified the mother had described her son as “pure evil,” who once stood over her other two sons with a knife.
The detective said she admitted to giving the boy medication to calm him down and had him sleep in a closet without his stepfather knowing while telling the stepfather that she sent her son to Mexico for treatment, The Associated Press reported.
He testified she was frustrated and “would cry a lot because she would say she didn’t know what to do.”
Aguilar was arrested on Aug. 22, 2016. Around 2:15 p.m., patrol officers responded to a radio call of a suspicious death investigation involving a child in the 2200 block of West Sunset Avenue, police said in a news release.
The stepfather told police his wife, Veronica Aguilar, told him her 11-year-old son was dead.
He found the victim wrapped in a blanket in a closet of the home in the 2100 block of Santa Ynez Street in Los Angeles. Los Angeles Fire Department Paramedics responded and pronounced the boy dead.
He suffered from signs of malnutrition and physical abuse and had been dead for a few hours.
Aguilar, then 39, was booked into jail on a charge of child endangerment resulting in death or great bodily injury.
Citing court records, the LA Times reported that Yonatan had been in closets for three years before he died.
An online Autism Memorial website said the boy was nicknamed “Chubby.” The site said his teachers reported he was hungry, stealing food, and had come to school with a black eye and that his mother had taken him out of school, telling “everyone she had sent him to Mexico to a special school.”
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