CRIMINAL COURTS
Accused dad: Biting kids learned from mom
Cesar Mojica Carmona, on trial for several counts of child abuse of his three young children, admitted to kicking, slapping, whipping and biting his kids, police testified Wednesday.
By Andrea Lorenz
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, April 24, 2008
SAN MARCOS — When asked why he bit his three young children, Cesar Mojica Carmona, 24, told police in a taped statement that he didn't know.
"There's no explanation," Mojica Carmona said at one point. "I'm an (expletive)."
The statement was entered into evidence Wednesday in the second day of testimony in Mojica Carmona's trial, in which he faces several charges of injury to a child, a felony. He is accused of abusing his 4-year-old daughter and 3-year-old twins, a boy and a girl, including biting, kicking and hitting them.
San Marcos Detective Adrian Marin told Hays County jurors Wednesday that Mojica Carmona spoke without an attorney present after being arrested in 2006. Marin said he interviewed Mojica Carmona in Spanish; Mojica Carmona told police he came from Guanajuato, Mexico, to the United States about 1996.
Marin said Mojica Carmona told him that he regularly blacked out from drinking and didn't remember what he did to the children.
Marin asked Mojica Carmona several times whether he understood that he had a right to have an attorney, and Mojica Carmona answered affirmatively, according to a translated transcript of the two-hour interview.
During the interview, Mojica Carmona attested many times that he was a good father to his children and that many people would tell him as much, Marin said.
"He always said he never hit them hard," Marin told jurors.
The state removed the three children from the home where they lived near Dripping Springs with Mojica Carmona and their mother, Sara Amaya, 23. A fourth child, a boy born after the arrests, is in foster care with his siblings.
When the state removed them, the children had too many scars, bruises and bite marks on their bodies to count, and they were visibly malnourished, according to testimony Tuesday.
The children had several scars from blunt-force trauma inside and around their mouths, according to testimony Wednesday from Pamela Singletary, an Austin-area pediatric dentist who examined them.
In his statement to police, Mojica Carmona, who cared for the children while Amaya was at work, said he'd feed them cereal for breakfast and keep them in a room watching cartoons so they wouldn't be injured in other parts of the home where there were exposed nails and construction work going on.
In explaining his children's injuries, Mojica Carmona said a scorpion stung his son and then a drawer fell on him.
At another point, Mojica Carmona told police he bit his children as a discipline technique that he said he learned from his mother.
The trial is scheduled to continue for several days. Amaya is also charged with multiple counts of injury to a child; her trial is pending.
alorenz@statesman.com; 246-0008
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