Pomona couple sentenced to prison for 2-year-old daughter's starvation death

POMONA -- A couple accused neglecting their 2-year-old daughter and allowing her to starve to death were sentenced to prison this afternoon after pleading no contest to child abuse.

Lupe Lopez and Gabriel Garcia, both 29, had been charged with murder for the death of Isabel Garcia, who weighed only 19 pounds when she died on May 19, 2008.

The Pomona couple reached plea agreements with prosecutors today in which murder charges were dropped.

Lopez was sentenced to 12 years and 8 months in prison after pleading no contest to three counts of child abuse and admitting a special allegation that her actions caused her daughter's death. Her conviction carries a strike as part of the state's three-strikes law.

Garcia pleaded guilty to one count of child abuse and was sentenced to 6 years in prison. He had been jailed on unrelated charges for nearly three weeks when his daughter was found dead.

Two days after Isabel Garcia's birth on March 29, 2006, she was placed in foster care because of concerns about possible neglect and her father's drug use.

Garcia's foster mother, Ludivina Ramirez, testified at a preliminary hearing that the toddler was healthy when she cared for her, weighing 20 pounds when she was 1.

When the child was 15 months old, she returned to live with her parents at a Holt Avenue mobile home park. Eleven months later she was dead.

An autopsy found that the girl's cause of death was malnutrition, and she had bruises and cuts on her body as well as injuries to her toes, a Pomona police detective testified at a preliminary hearing.

Lopez and Garcia denied trying to harm the girl in interviews with police investigators, the detective testified.

Lopez and Garcia, wearing jail scrubs, listened in court today as a prosecutor read a statement written by their dead daughter's former foster parents.

The foster parents, who now care for Lopez and Garcia's five other children, expressed shock at Isabel Garcia's death.

"It is baffling how any feeling adult -- must less two parents -- could watch their child waste away," the couple said in the statement.