Man sentenced to death for 2010 murder of 17-year-old Norma Lopez

Jesse Torres, 44, has been sentenced to death for the abduction and murder of 17-year-old Norma Lopez in 2010.

"They say that time heals everything, but it doesn’t. We just had to
learn how to go on with our lives and live with the pain, even though it isn’t easy to do," Lopez's sister told the judge at the sentence hearing.

Lopez was kidnapped on July 15, 2010, as she walked from summer school at Valley View High School in Moreno Valley to a friend’s house. Her body was found five days later in a dirt field about three miles away.

Initially, no DNA matches were found in the state’s Combined DNA Index System. Prosecutors said that changed by September 2011, when potential matches were identified out of the 1.8 million individuals whose biological identities were then in the database.

After over a year, authorities were able to link Torres' DNA to the crime.

This came about when Torres was required to provide DNA samples after a domestic violence incident in early 2011. According to Deputy District Attorney Kevin Beecham, testing on the DNA strands collected from Norma’s garments and possessions, both at the scene of her abduction and where her body was placed, revealed that the chance of an errant forensic profile was 1 in 5.87 million.

Torres was arrested and officially charged with Lopez's murder in Oct. 2011.

Deputy District Attorney Michael Kersse later revealed in court that Torres lived right across the street from Valley View High, even theorizing that he had been watching her for some time.

According to Kersse, every day that she’d left the Valley View campus, Lopez had been with her boyfriend. But on July 15, 2010, he was behind schedule, and she set off on her own. She headed south on Creekside, east to Quail Creek Drive, then south again on Mill Creek Road before crossing an open field toward Cottonwood Avenue, where her older sister and friends gathered almost daily that summer.

Kersse played a security surveillance videotape from a house looking down on Creekside, and the recording captured the last images of Norma alive, walking the route.

The tape also showed, moments later, a green SUV cruising slowly in the direction that Norma was walking, shortly after 10 a.m. The vehicle re-appears less than five minutes later, speeding away from the area. According to the prosecution, Torres owned a green Nissan Xterra at the time.

Torres was found guilty of first-degree murder on March 13, 2019. A jury also found the special circumstance of murder during the commission of a felony, in this case, kidnapping, to be true.

A week later, the same jurors recommended the death penalty.

On Friday, Judge Bernard Schwartz affirmed the jury’s decision and sentenced Torres to death.

At the sentencing hearing, Norma’s sister also read a letter from the family.
In the letter, Norma’s mother wrote: "I took Norma to school that day not knowing it was the last time I will ever see her again. That’s the day this nightmare started. Without Norma, my house was filled with pain and sadness."

"In my house there is no happiness like how it was when Norma was here," her mother continued. "Everywhere in the house there was laughter and happiness. It was beautiful. But that all ended the day that Norma did not return home to us."