Stiff Sentences in a Heinous Crime
by Rod Hughes
A mother, 42 years old, and her 26-year-old daughter drew stiff sentences in one of the country’s most gruesome crimes in recent memory— the stabbing murder of a 22-year-old pregnant woman and the forcible extraction of her eight month fetus. Sandra Monge was sentenced to the maximum 35 year sentence for, according to penal judge Jose Enrique Desanti, for planning the murder in order to use the baby to aid her ailing marriage.
Emotions after the verdict ran so high, that the families of both the slain girl and of the defendants entered into a brawl and had to be separated by judicial guards.
Katerin Valerin, Monge’s daughter, was sentenced to 30 years in prison as her mother’s accomplice in Cinthya Berrios’s murder. Together, they allegedly forced the pregnant woman to the bank of the Rio Segundo where the murder took place near Heredia April 19, 2006. After performing the criminal abortion, the mother was thrown into a pool in the river.
Miraculously, the girl child lived. The two might have gotten away with the atrocity, according to the prosecution, if a witness had not seen Katerin Valerin leaving the site where the slain woman had been thrown into the river.