A wife who stabbed her husband to death on the morning of his birthday in 2021 as he lay in bed at their Santa Ana home was convicted Wednesday of murder.
An Orange County Superior Court jury deliberated for a little more than five hours before finding Michelle Gutierrez, then 32, guilty of second-degree murder for the killing of her husband — 38-year-old Cesar Reyes Zuna — at their home in the 1000 block of West Bishop Street, a slaying the defense blamed on mental issues related to medication Gutierrez had been taking to help deal with seizures.
As her husband slept, prosecutors allege, Gutierrez grabbed two knives from their kitchen, locked the door to their bedroom and used both knives to stab her husband repeatedly, including on his neck and in the back as he fell out of the bed.
Senior Assistant District Attorney Susan Price noted that a pulsometer was found on the bloody sheets, which the prosecutor alleged Gutierrez used to make sure her husband was dead. The couple had an argument the previous night, Price said, and she had asked a friend to come by in the morning to take her children to a relative’s home.
“She pinned him down and made sure he was dead,” Price told jurors during closing arguments Monday in a Santa Ana courtroom.
The couple’s two children heard their father scream and apparently tried to force their way into their parents bedroom by kicking, hitting and using Nerf guns on the locked door. The kids heard their mother saying “You did this to yourself” over and over, according to testimony during the trial. Officers arrived at the home to find an “incredibly graphic scene,” the prosecutor said, with “blood everywhere.”
Gutierrez reportedly attempted to take her own life after killing her husband, and while talking to nurses expressed remorse for killing her husband.
Citing entries in a journal discovered by investigators, the prosecution argued that Gutierrez felt “desperate” leading up to the killing. Price said Gutierrez had previously cheated on and lied to her husband and worried he was doing the same. And she worried their marriage was falling apart and she was in danger of losing her children, the prosecutor added.
Deputy Public Defender Jazmine Torres didn’t dispute that Gutierrez killed her husband. But the defense attorney argued it wasn’t the premeditated slaying described by the prosecution.
“There is no motive, there is no planning, there is nothing calculated about this case,” Torres told jurors during her closing arguments.
Just before the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns began in early 2020, Gutierrez suffered the first of several epileptic seizures. And in the months leading up to her husband’s death, she struggled with side effects to the medication she was taking to deal with the seizures, the defense argued.
The medication left Gutierrez’s mental health spiraling downward, Torres told jurors. Her paranoid and delusional thinking included believing that people were watching her, that someone had hacked her electronic accounts and that her husband had taken a life insurance policy out on her and wanted to kill her, the defense attorney added.
“She knew something was wrong, but she didn’t understand what was going wrong,” the defense attorney said. “It was her new reality.”
The prosecutor countered that having a psychotic reaction to the type of medication that Gutierrez was taking is extraordinarily rare.
“You don’t get a pass because you have anxiety,” Price said. “You don’t get a pass because life is hard.”
Gutierrez and Zuna grew up together in the same Santa Ana neighborhood where the killing took place. Both had parents who lived in homes down the street.
Gutierrez faces up to 16 years to life in prison. She is scheduled to return to court for sentencing on May 30.