Craig J. Charron, who burst into the apartment of Huntington Beach of his girlfriend and fatally stabbed her the day she changed the locks to keep him away, was sentenced to life for life on Friday to 26.
Laura Sardinha, 25, had pursued a diploma in online psychology in the hope of advising women in abusive relations. She had tried to escape her relationship with Charron, who had punctured her eardrum in an earlier attack, and she had withdrawn a ban on him.
Friday, three months after a jury condemned the first degree murder charron for his death of September 2020, the judge of the Superior Court of Orange County, Michael Cassidy, described him as “insane and brutal” crime and gave him the maximum sentence authorized by law.
“All Laura wanted was to be free from mistreatment and torment,” said the mother of the victim, Marie Sardinha, to the judge. “This man should not be in society. He should never be released. ”
The victim’s brother Shawn Sardinha said he had trouble finding reasons to live after the death of his sister.
“I now give updates of my life to a blue vase,” he said.
At the trial, Charron, 39, described himself as an Air Force veteran and a former combat doctor with a 100%disability rating. He received psychiatric treatment at the VA.
During the conviction, Charron brought the scrubs of the green camouflage granted to the detainees who served in the army, and his lawyer said that Charron had participated in programs of veterans in the county prison.
The victim’s father said he was himself a Vietnam veteran and hated any suggestion that Charron could get a leniency as a veterinarian.
“It makes me sick,” Manuel Sardinha told the judge. He recalled how she would play “the twelve Christmas days” on the piano at the family’s home during the holidays. He said that injuries from a motorcycle accident in 2019 had derailed his ambition from the culinary school, but she planned to use the financial regulations to open a therapy practice.
Charron went out with Sardinha for a few months. She had given him nearly $ 100,000 from the $ 750,000 she won in the accident regulations.
Two weeks before killing her, she sent him a text to say that she could not hear because he had broken his eardrum. She complained of hitting her. He told the police that his injuries were the result of “raw sex” and formulated him in the drop in accusations.
On the morning of her death, she registered herself by begging him to get out of her apartment, saying: “You terrify me, because you do not leave.”
When he left, he bombed her with calls and sms, which she ignored. At the beginning of the afternoon, at his request, a maintenance worker changed his locks, to keep him away.
Nevertheless, Charron somehow went back to the interior around 1:15 p.m. – it is not clear how – when she was on a call to three with her mother and her best friend. They heard him cry: “Oh my God, he is here.”
The friend hung up to call 911. Sardinha recalled him and left a scary vocal message of 37 seconds, shouting: “He will kill me!”
His voice was strangely absent from vocal messaging, which suggested that the prosecutor suggested was a function of his state of mind calculated and unharmed to kill her.
She died when the police arrived, with stab wounds on her chest and head. He had almost cut off his nose. Police found a charron with wounds on the chest and neck knife that the authorities suggested inflicting on him to create the fiction that she had attacked it.
Deputy district. Atty. Janine Madera said that it does not matter that he simulated the injuries or that she had inflicted them on self -defense, because he was the clear, muscular and 9 -inch aggressor.
Three of the ex-girlfriends of Charron, who have taken hold of restraint against him, said that he had attacked them. One said he had smothered her, a second that he had slapped her, a third that he had pinned her to a wall.
Charron said that his confrontation with Sardinha was “misty” in his memory but that he acted in self -defense. Defense lawyer Michael Guisti said that his client’s violent history consisted of “non-gastronomic violence” and that he may have acted in the fire of passion when he killed Sardinha.
Charron made no statement during the conviction on Friday and made no excuse.
