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The woman accused of killing her 9-year-old brother inside a Salt Lake City restaurant will not be going to trial.
Rebecca Hernandez-Velasco accepted a plea deal with prosecutors, just a week before she was set to go to trial, and she will testify against the friend who is also accused in the same crime.
Solomon Chacon, the defense attorney, said this plea deal was in his client's best interest.
She pleaded guilty to child abuse homicide and obstruction of justice, both are second-degree felonies. In exchange, prosecutors dropped the first-degree murder charge and a child abuse/neglect charge.
Her attorney said during the trial he was going to argue that the other suspect in this case, Pedro Gaucin-Canales, forced his client to participate in the crime by threatening her.
But because of some late evidence that revealed the threat was more implied and not expressed, he went for the plea deal to avoid harsher penalties.
Chacon said Hernandez-Velasco knew that what she did was reckless. "She also feels a lot of guilt that she actually wasn't able to help him at the time," Chacon said. "This is her little brother, and she feels very, very badly as to what happened to him."
Her attorney says putting her 9-year-old brother in a garbage can filled with icy water was not her idea, but she did get the water and the ice.
Nine-year-old Josue Contreras-Velasco died in the kitchen of the Melting Pot Restaurant on July 22 of last year.
Prosecutors said he died from hypothermia after he was forced to stay in a trash can filled with ice water for 45 minutes, as a disciplinary measure.
Hernandez-Velasco said the boy had been disciplined in that way in the past by Gaucin-Canales, who is a family friend.
Chacon said, "There was an on-going relationship between these two families, and I think Mr. Gaucin-Canales was kind of the disciplinarian because he was an absentee father figure. So, in the course of that culture, some of that harsh discipline is sometimes meted out and that may have been part of it."
The two suspects worked together at the restaurant.
The victim's mother was in court today and cried during the hearing. This plea deal prevented her from having to testify against her daughter during a trial.
If convicted, Hernandez-Velasco faces 1 to 15 years to life in prison for each charge. She will be sentenced after Gaucin-Canales's trial is over. She will testify against him.
E-mail: syi@ksl.com
