Woman admits she poured oil on ‘dad’
Boyfriend allegedly then set fire to man
SANTA FE — A sobbing Jeannie Ann Sandoval testified Monday on the first day of her ex-boyfriend’s murder trial how she had applied the cooking oil used to burn an elderly relative she called “dad,” and who she and her boyfriend believed had been killed in a fight.
Anthony Yepez, 28, is on trial for first-degree murder and other charges in the Oct. 29, 2012, death of George Ortiz, 75, at Ortiz’s Luisa Street apartment in Santa Fe. Yepez and Sandoval, 30, were staying with Ortiz after relocating from California.
Authorities previously have said it was unknown whether Ortiz was dead when he was set on fire. But a prosecutor Monday suggested that the burning itself helped kill Ortiz, telling the jury that his causes of death were “homicidal vio-
lence” and “thermal injury.” Ortiz was burned in a failed effort to get rid of evidence — Ortiz’s body — according to Sandoval’s testimony.
Sandoval, who was adopted by her grandmother who was married to Ortiz, testified that she, Yepez and Ortiz had been drinking when a struggle broke out because Ortiz hit her, and refused to give her a cigarette and loan her his car. She also said that Ortiz had started physically abusing her a month before.
After a struggle between Ortiz and Yepez that left Ortiz motionless on the floor, Sandoval testified, Yepez “got the cooking oil and handed it to me.”
“It just kind of clicked — I dumped the oil,” she said. A prosecutor told the jury that Yepez tore pages from a phone book to help make the fire, but Sandoval testified she didn’t remember seeing Yepez with a phone book. “I saw he lit a piece of paper, but I did not see him put it directly to the body,” Sandoval said.
Sandoval estimated that, within 10 minutes after Ortiz hit her, Yepez and Ortiz started struggling. Sandoval said the two men fell to the floor and she yelled for them to stop as she ran to a bedroom. Yepez “wasn’t strangling or choking him,” said Sandoval. “I did not see Anthony slug him or any- thing like that.”
But when Sandoval came out of the bedroom, she said, Ortiz was lying in a pool of blood. She did chest compressions and checked unsuccessfully for a pulse. “My father was, I believed to be dead,” said Sandoval.
“Anthony told me not to touch him (Ortiz)” and that “we had to get rid of the evidence — the body,” said Sandoval, and that’s when she poured the oil.
After they burned Ortiz, the couple packed clothes in trash bags and drove to Española. They were spotted and arrested the next day by sheriff’s deputies.
“I know I had to take responsibility for the part I played in my father’s death — I poured the cooking oil,” Sandoval testified. When shown a photo of Ortiz before his death in court, Sandoval sobbed, “It’s my dad.” Sandoval pleaded guilty last year to second-degree murder in exchange for a maximum possible prison sentence of nine years.
A defense lawyer for Yepez previously wanted to introduce scientific testimony that genetic testing on Yepez showed he possessed the socalled “warrior gene,” which allegedly can reduce impulse control and increase the propensity for violence. But Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer ruled out that defense.