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child and get to a place of safety,” Justice Ignazio Ruvolo wrote in the decision.
Ruvolo added that “the evidence overwhelmingly suggested that the
appellant was simply enraged.”
On March 11, 2002, Fuentes-Ortiz brought her husband the milkshake
laced with Ortho-7 insecticide. She told him it was a protein shake intended
to help him build muscle mass. Gilbert Ortiz testified that the drink tasted
“like chocolate but sour and burning.”
Ortiz fell to the ground in convulsions, slipped into a 10-day coma,
suffered multiple organ failures and a heart attack and was incommunicative.
He testified he has residual health problems from the poisoning.
While her husband was comatose, Fuentes-Ortiz gave Redwood City police
conflicting stories of where the poison originated. Once, she said a masked man
tried to kill her husband; another time, she claimed it was a suicide attempt.
By the time Ortiz could tell authorities who had given him the questionable
shake, Fuentes-Ortiz had fled to Mexico with their 2-year-old son, Jonathan.
She was profiled numerous times on the TV show “Unsolved Mysteries” over
the eight years it took FBI agents to arrest her in the Mexican state of Jalisco.
Jonathan remained missing until Fuentes-Ortiz’s mother brought him to the
county jail to visit his imprisoned mother.
Fuentes-Ortiz told the court that by poisoning her husband she meant only
to incapacitate, not kill him, to escape an abusive marriage that included
sexual abuse.
“There’s no motive, no explanation for anything other than domestic violence,”
defense attorney Joseph O’Sullivan said during his closing arguments.
Prosecutors argued, though, that the murder attempt was fueled by jealousy
and anger over Ortiz’s long work hours.
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