A 36-year-old Santa Ana woman was sentenced last week to 16 years to life for stabbing her husband to death as he lay in bed the morning of his birthday in 2021, according to court records.
Michelle Gutierrez was convicted in April by an Orange County Superior Court jury of second-degree murder and sentenced on Friday, Aug. 8.
Gutierrez’s public defender said mental-health issues related to medication Gutierrez had been taking to help deal with seizures led her to kill her husband, while prosecutors said the stabbing followed a fight the couple had the previous night.
On Jan. 21, 2021, police arrived at the home in the 1000 block of West Bishop Street to find an “incredibly graphic scene” with “blood everywhere,” Senior Assistant District Attorney Susan Price said.
Gutierrez was also found with injuries, too, and told first responders she had tried to take her own life.
Pointing to a journal discovered by investigators, the prosecution argued Gutierrez felt “desperate,” leading up to the killing. Price said Gutierrez had cheated on her husband, Cesar Reyes Zuna, 38, and worried he was doing the same. She also feared their marriage was falling apart and that she might lose her children.
As Zuna slept, Gutierrez grabbed two knives from the kitchen, locked the door to their bedroom and stabbed her husband repeatedly in his neck and back, prosecutors said.
A pulsometer, a watch-like device that takes a person’s pulse, was found on the bloody sheets; prosecutors argued Gutierrez used it to make sure her husband was dead.
Their two children heard their father scream but did not see the violence, Price said.
They tried to force their way into the room by kicking, hitting and using Nerf guns on the locked door and at one point they heard their mother saying, “You did this to yourself” over and over, according to trial testimony. They then ran to a relative’s home.
Jazmine Torres, Gutierrez’s public defender, didn’t dispute Gutierrez killed her husband, but he did argue that it wasn’t premeditated.
The public defender said Gutierrez began suffering the first of several epileptic seizures just before the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. She struggled with the medication’s side effects, which led to a spiraling of her mental health, Torres told jurors.
Those struggles included paranoia and delusional thinking, Torres said: Gutierrez believed people were watching her, that someone hacked her electronic accounts, and that her husband had taken out a life insurance policy and wanted to kill her.
“She knew something was wrong, but she didn’t understand what was going wrong,” Torres said during closing arguments in April. “It was her new reality.”
Gutierrez and Zuna grew up together in the same Santa Ana neighborhood where the killing took place and both had parents who lived nearby.