Tami Joy Huntsman, the East Salinas mom accused of beating and torturing to death two children in her care and nearly killing their older half-sister, pleaded guilty today, Feb. 28, to two counts of murder in the children’s deaths, as well as torturing and abusing all three victims.
The plea came more than two years after a witness called police on Dec. 11, 2015, to report that a badly abused girl had been left in a car outside an apartment building where Huntsman and her teenage companion, Gonzalo Curiel Jr., were staying. Officials there got the child medical help and began investigating.
Two days later they determined the little girl had two younger half-siblings who were nowhere to be found. Police located the badly abused bodies of Shaun Tara, 6, and Delylah Tara, 3, wrapped in plastic and shoved into plastic bins in a storage facility in Redding. The surviving girl, then 9, also showed signs of malnutrition and prolonged abuse, including multiple broken bones that went untreated and healed deformed.
Officials believe the murders took place in Huntsman’s East Salinas home on Thanksgiving Day, after the surviving victim took a bagel without permission.
Prosecutors had sought the death penalty against Huntsman; instead, she agreed to plead guilty to all charges in exchange for two sentences of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
As Monterey County Superior Court Judge Pam Butler read the charges—which included the facts that Huntsman had starved the children and exposed them to hypothermia by keeping them confined in a cold, concrete shower—Huntsman stood at the defense table in the courtroom, flanked by her attorneys, Scott Erdbacher and Marcia Morrissey. Wearing a jailhouse uniform, she hung her head, rocked back and forth and wept as the counts were read, saying “guilty” or “yes” when Butler asked her a question. Morrissey frequently wrapped her arm around Huntsman’s shoulder and patted her on the back to calm her during the 15-minute hearing.
Outside of court, Morrissey, a Los Angeles-based attorney who specializes in death penalty cases, said the plea was part of an effort “to avoid further pain”—to Huntsman’s own children, who likely witnessed much of the abuse and were expected to be called to testify in their mother’s trial; to her other family members; to the family members of the dead children; and to the surviving victim, the prosecution’s key witness in the case.
“Her one desire was to alleviate whatever pain she could,” Morrissey says. “She can’t make it go away, but she could do this.”
Asked about the seeming change of heart in agreeing to take the death penalty off the table, Chief Assistant District Attorney Berkley Brannon says his office isn’t looking at it as a change.
“When we make a death penalty determination, we are saying in our view that the conduct and the crimes at issue and the facts warrant the death penalty,” he says. “In this situation, Ms. Huntsman’s counsel came to us and asked if we would accept the plea for life without the possibility of parole.”
There are two reasons the DA’s office accepted.
“First, this is a final judgment. She’s waived all rights she has to appeal or challenge her sentence. It’s a certainty she will die in prison, and we didn’t have that when we said we would seek the death penalty,” Brannon said. “The victims know what will happen to a certainty. There’s no ‘what if’ and there’s no ‘maybe.’ The case is over.”
Second, Brannon says, the plea spares the surviving victim the ordeal of testifying in Huntsman’s trial.
That second trial is for Curiel, whose trial is expected to start April 2.
Curiel, who was 17 at the time of the arrest, moved in with Huntsman’s family several years before the Tara children, and was friends with Huntsman’s oldest son. Curiel’s father gave Huntsman some parenting rights over his son, including making decisions about his education.
Huntsman was pregnant with Curiel’s baby when they were arrested. She gave birth to the child, a girl, at Natividad Medical Center, on July 22, 2016. The baby was placed in protective custody and with a foster family now seeking to adopt her. That placement is the subject of a Sixth District Court of Appeal case in which Huntsman claims that Monterey County Social Services violated her right to help choose who would raise her daughter.
Huntsman is a cousin of Shaun and Delylah’s father, who was the 9-year-old girl’s step-father; Huntsman agreed to take in all three children after their mother was struck by a car and killed and their father was incarcerated.
