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LAS VEGAS (AP) -- A jury decided Tuesday that a 22-year-old Utah man who confessed to brutally stabbing two little girls left alone in a trailer outside a Mesquite casino in 2003 should die by lethal injection.
Beau Santino Maestas pleaded guilty in May 2005 to charges including murder and attempted murder.
Maestas becomes the 82nd person on Nevada's death row. He apologized last week for killing 3-year-old Kristyanna Cowan and stabbing Cowan's half-sister, 10-year-old Brittney Bergeron. Brittney was left paralyzed from the waist down in the Jan. 22, 2003, attack.
It was the second penalty trial for Maestas. A jury deadlocked 10-2 in favor of the death penalty in June 2005, prompting Clark County District Court Judge Donald Mosley to declare a mistrial.
Authorities say Maestas, who was 19 at the time of the killing, and his 16-year-old sister, Monique Maestas, broke into the trailer and attacked the girls after the girls' mother, Tamara Bergeron, and her then-boyfriend, Robert Schmidt, sold them salt instead of methamphetamine.
(Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
