Mother of Gabriel Fernandez again seeks re-sentencing in son’s torture death

A Palmdale woman who pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in the torture death of her 8-year-old son will seek re-sentencing again Monday in front of a judge in Los Angeles.

Pearl Sinthia Fernandez, 42, was sentenced in March 2018 to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the May 2013 killing of her son, Gabriel Fernandez. She has since filed two resentencing petitions contending that she could not now be convicted of murder, citing recent changes in state law that affect defendants in some murder cases.

Her boyfriend, Isauro Aguirre, now 45, was sentenced to death. His automatic appeal to the California Supreme Court is pending.

Gabriel was routinely beaten, starved, forced to sleep in a closet and tortured until his death nearly 13 years ago, according to investigators.

In June 2021, Fernandez’s first petition was denied by Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge George G. Lomeli. The decision came after a review of the petition and the overall record of the case, the judge said, noting that Fernandez had agreed to waive any and all of her appellate rights at the time of her February 2018 guilty plea.

“It has been established by her own admission during her guilty plea that the murder was intentional and involved the infliction of torture over a period of several months,” the judge said at the June 2021 hearing,

The latest petition was filed in February. Fernandez claimed the state-appoint defense attorney “provided ineffective assistance of counsel” and that she was “coerced” into signing a guilty plea.

Fernandez noted that she had received assistance with the new petition, which said that “the petitioner has comprehension issues and documented verbal comprehension of a second-grade student” and that she was “mistakenly under the impression that her case would then be going to appeal” when she signed the plea agreement.

Gabriel was 7 when the abuse began, according to investigators. Los Angeles County Fire Department personnel responded to the family’s northern Los Angeles County home May 22, 2013 after a report that Gabriel was not breathing. He was declared brain-dead that day and taken off life support two days later.

Fernandez and Aguirre were arrested and an outcry over the handling of the case by Los Angeles County social workers, who had multiple contacts with the family, led to an investigation into the agency’s involvement and criminal charges against two former social workers and their two supervisors. That case was subsequently dismissed after a state appeals court panel found that the four “never had the requisite duty to control the abusers and did not have care or custody of Gabriel” for purposes of the child abuse charge leveled against them.

In a statement before she was sentenced, Fernandez said, “I want to say I’m sorry to my family for what I did … I wish Gabriel was alive. Every day I wish that I made better choices.”

At the March 2018 sentencing for Fernandez and Aguirre, the judge described the case as “the most aggravated and egregious case of torture this court has ever witnessed.”