STOCKTON, Calif. — A woman kidnapped, raped and murdered an 8-year-old girl and stuffed her body in a suitcase that was dumped in a pond just a few miles from home, prosecutors alleged today.
Melissa Huckaby, 28, was charged with murdering her daughter’s playmate, Sandra Cantu, in a gruesome crime that has shocked and terrified residents of Tracy, a Northern California city of about 78,000, 60 miles east of San Francisco.
Huckaby, who volunteered as a Sunday school teacher at her grandfather’s Clover Road Baptist Church in Tracy, was due to be arraigned this afternoon.
Prosecutors filed the murder charge today before Huckaby’s scheduled court appearance and included in their allegations the special circumstances of rape with a foreign object, lewd or lascivious conduct with a child under 14 and murder in the course of a kidnapping.
The special circumstances mean Huckaby, if convicted, could face the death penalty or life in prison without the possibility of parole. Prosecutors have said they have not decided whether to seek the death penalty.
Sandra disappeared March 27, last seen on surveillance camera video skipping outside the Orchard Estates Mobile Home Park where she lived just five doors from Huckaby.
A 10-day search by law enforcement and the community ended on April 6, when farmworkers draining an irrigation pond a few miles away from the mobile home complex found the suitcase containing Sandra’s body.
Police have said Sandra was found wearing the same clothes she had on when she was last seen: a pink “Hello Kitty” T-shirt and black leggings.
They have not said how, why or where she was killed, and the coroner’s office has said autopsy results are pending.
Huckaby was arrested Friday, hours after she told a Tracy Press reporter that the suitcase was hers but it had been stolen the day Sandra went missing.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
