The natural life sentence imposed on a Tucson mother whose son’s skeletal remains were found in 2014 in a toy chest left outside at the family’s former home has been upheld by the Arizona Court of Appeals.
Raquel Marcella Barreras was convicted by a Pima County jury in 2019 of first-degree murder and one count of child abuse stemming from the 2013 death of her three-year-old son Roman. She had already pleaded guilty to concealing a dead body and three counts of child abuse involving her other children.
The boy’s death was ruled a homicide due to starvation, according to trial testimony. The date of the offenses is listed as April 1, 2013 although court records show the boy could have died anytime from Spring 2013 to January 2014.
Barreras appealed the jury’s guilty verdicts after sentencing in July 2019, arguing in part that the trial judge abused his discretion by allowing jurors to hear testimony about her day-to-day treatment of the boy, including keeping him in a covered playpen and isolating him in a concrete laundry room.
She also renewed an objection to testimony given by another of her children to seeing Roman’s body in the toy chest sometime before the family moved into another home in January 2014. And she objected to the fact jurors heard about acts of physical abuse unrelated to the prosecution’s theory that she starved her son to death.
But in its July 1 decision, a three-judge panel of the Arizona Court of Appeals rejected Barreras’ arguments and affirmed the jury’s two verdicts as well as the life sentence plus 24 years.
“We view the facts in the light most favorable to sustaining the convictions and resolve reasonable inferences against Barreras,” Presiding Judge Karl Eppich wrote for the panel. “Accordingly, the evidence at issue was relevant, and the trial court did not abuse its discretion in so finding.”
The appellate court also rejected a double jeopardy claim by Barreras, who argued it was “factually impossible” for her to commit murder without committing child abuse, and thus only one sentence should apply. Eppich cited a 2014 Arizona Supreme Court decision, State v. Jones, in rejecting the double jeopardy argument.
“Murder requires causing the death of another, whereas child abuse requires a child victim. Thus, each offense requires an element that the other does not,” Eppich wrote. “Accordingly, Barreras’s consecutive sentences for felony murder and its predicate felony of child abuse do not constitute double jeopardy.”
The boy’s father, Martin Ray Barreras, is also serving a natural life sentence for his role in abusing and murdering the boy.
Court records show Roman and three older siblings were removed from their parents’ care by the Arizona Department of Child Safety (DCS) in July 2010 as a result of drug use in the household. At the time Romas was a newborn. He and the other children were later returned to the father’s care on the condition Raquel Barreras had no contact with them, but Martin Barreras did not adhere to those rules.
Several relatives reportedly contacted DCS with concerns about the children. The last caseworker contact with the family was in August 2012; no one from Roman’s extended family recalled seeing the boy in 2013.
The boy’s skeletal remains were found outside the home by the property’s owner in March 2014, several weeks after the family was evicted.
