Baby Raina (Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office).
A California father struck his infant daughter so hard in the face that it "caused her brain to dislodge and move to a different part of her head" and left a bruise in the "distinctive shape and size of an adult hand" on her cheek.
Jesse Manuel Figueroa, 36, was sentenced to 25 years to life behind bars for the death of his 8-month-old daughter Raina, the Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office said. A jury convicted him of murder earlier this year.
Figueroa brought his unconscious daughter to a Mountain View fire station on July 4, 2020. Firefighters rushed her to the hospital, where she died a few days later. The father claimed he was taking her to a family barbecue when she "mysteriously fell unconscious and blood began seeping from her nose."
But while at the hospital, a bruise developed in the shape of an adult hand on Raina's cheek. An autopsy found she died from blunt force trauma that caused brain hemorrhaging.
"The medical examiner revealed the blow to Raina 'was so hard it caused her brain to dislodge and move to a different part of her head,'" prosecutors wrote.
Investigators later learned that Figueroa was also abusive toward Raina's mother and their other two children, ages 2 and 3. He strangled Raina's mother and forced the children to kneel on rice, prosecutors said.
Figueroa was not allowed to have unsupervised visits with Raina, but he convinced her mother to allow him to watch Raina alone so he could take her to the family barbecue.
"Raina mattered. Her life mattered," Raina's grandfather told the court in a victim impact statement. "She was not just a name in a case file. She was a baby who was deeply loved and who should still be here today."
District Attorney Jeff Rosen noted that Raina would be 6 years old if she were alive today.
"These cases break our hearts, at the brutality, at the senselessness, at the sheer loss of an innocent child," Rosen said in a statement. "Today, we can only feel some sense of justice that this man will never hurt another child."