Parents of Slain Woman Tell Court of Their Loss

SANTA MONICA —  For months after her daughter’s stabbing death, Elba Salinas was terrified to answer the door or telephone, fearing the killers would return to take her 2-year-old grandson from her, she testified.

Her grandson Michael suffered from fever, vomiting and diarrhea and refused to eat or sleep, crying out inconsolably in the night: “Mommy! “Mommy!”

Salinas testified Friday in Santa Monica Superior Court in the penalty phase of the trial of Paul Carasi and Donna Kay Lee, who have already been found guilty of murdering Salinas’ daughter Sonia.

Her family’s lives were shattered by the killing, she said.

Carasi and his lover Lee were convicted Tuesday of killing Sonia Salinas, Carasi’s former girlfriend, over child support payments for Michael. Also killed in the stabbing attack after a Mother’s Day luncheon at Universal CityWalk in 1995 was Carasi’s mother, Doris Carasi.

On Tuesday, a six-man, six-woman jury found that the couple not only murdered the two women, but that they also ambushed them and were motivated by money--special circumstances that carry possible death penalties.

On Friday, a pale Paul Carasi sat with eyes downcast during the penalty phase of the trial presided over by Judge Leslie Light. With Lee seated nearby, he shifted nervously in his chair when Salinas’ mother began to sob as she read a prepared statement in Spanish.

“Those killers also assassinated me because I feel like the living dead,” said the diminutive black-clad woman, her face streaked with tears.

“There are no more happy holidays for me,” said Salinas, who has been caring for her grandson for the last three years. “We celebrate holidays by going to the cemetery and bringing her roses.

“When I go to the store, my grandson asks me to buy flowers for his mommy, Sonia,” she said.

Family and friends of the dead woman punctuated the mother’s testimony with their sobs and a female jury member wiped her eyes.

Sonia’s father, Jose Antonio Salinas, an auto mechanic, gave a heavy sigh as he stepped up to the witness podium in a crisp white shirt. He also read his statement in Spanish, describing his daughter’s Mother’s Day slaying as “the darkest and saddest day of my life.

“They chose the most sacred day to commit the most horrible crime,” he said, his voice quavering.

His grandson Michael, now 5, lost both a mother and a father on that day, he said. And he hasn’t dared to tell his 78-year-old mother, who lives in Texas and is very ill, of the crime. “News of this magnitude would bring her to her death,” he said.

“The hurt and the loss cannot be measured and we will never be able to forgive or forget.”

After his ex-wife Elba Salinas gave her testimony, the two embraced in the gallery and wept silently in each other’s arms.

A last-minute witness for the defense was Michael Torguson, a schoolteacher from Medford, Ore., who met Carasi at Grant High School in Van Nuys 15 years ago. He characterized Paul as a good friend who comforted him during a break-up with a girlfriend. He was also a good son who doted on his father after a stroke left the man speechless, he said.

But in his cross-examination of Torguson, Donna Lee’s attorney, Henry Hall, drew out a different description of Carasi.

Carasi was an outsider in high school whose substandard reading and writing skills threatened to keep him from graduating, Torguson testified.

After high school, Carasi started to act out sexual bondage and domination fantasies, frequenting “dungeons” or commercial establishments where he would pay women to tie him up and “beat” him, Torguson said.

And while Sonia Salinas was in the hospital recuperating from the difficult birth of their son, Carasi was dating another woman who complained to Torguson that she was frustrated that Carasi wouldn’t commit to her, he added.

Defense witnesses for Lee are scheduled to testify on Monday.