Michelle Gutierrez, a 36-year-old Santa Ana woman, is heading to state prison for the next 16 years to life after being sentenced on Friday, Aug. 8, for fatally stabbing her husband, Cesar Reyes Zuna, 38-years-old, on his birthday in 2021, as he lay in bed.
Gutierrez was convicted a few months ago, in April, by an Orange County Superior Court jury on a felony charge of second-degree murder.
Jazmine Torres, Gutierrez’s public defender, blamed mental-health issues related to medication Gutierrez had been taking to help deal with seizures for leading her to kill her husband.
Senior OCDA Assistant District Attorney Susan Price, the prosectuor, disagreed with Torres, saying that the stabbing followed a fight the couple had the night before.
SAPD police officers arrived at the home where Guttierez and Zuna lived, at the 1000 block of West Bishop Street, on Jan. 21, 2021, to find an “incredibly graphic scene” with “blood everywhere,” Price told the jury.
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, Zuna, and worried that he was also cheating on her. She also thgought that her marriage was falling apart and that she might eventually lose her children.
Price alleged that Gutierrez grabbed two kitchen knives, then locked the door to her bedroom before using both knives to repeatedly stab her husband. He was wounded on his neck and in the back, as he fell out of their bed.
Price told the jury that a pulsometer was found on the bloody sheets. She made the case that Gutierrez used the pulsometer to ensure her husband was dead after the attack.
Price also noted that the couple had an argument the previous night. Gutierrez had then asked a friend to come by in the morning to take her children to a relative’s home. Price thought this indicated that she was already planning her deadly attack.
As Price made her closing arguments she told the jury that Gutierrez “pinned him down and made sure he was dead.”
Sadly the couple’s two children heard their father scream as he was attacked. The kids apparently tried to force their way into their parents bedroom by kicking, hitting and even using Nerf guns on the locked door.
According to court testimony, the kids heard their mother saying “you did this to yourself” over and over, as she mercilessly attacked their father.
Gutierrez later apparently had some remorse about her actions. She reportedly attempted to take her own life, and while talking to nurses, she made remorseful comments about killing her husband.
Investigators later found a journal written by Gutierrez where she expressed feeling “desperate” before the fatal attack.
Ironically Gutierrez’ criminal actions eventually ensured that she did lose her kids, who presumably were placed with relatives or in foster care after the deadly attack.
The Public Defender, Torres, did not even try to argue that Gutierrez had not killed her husband. Instead Torres focused on the notion that the murder was not a premeditated slaying, as described by Price.
Torres told the jury, during her closing arguments, that “There is no motive, there is no planning, there is nothing calculated about this case.”
Gutierrez was taking anti-seizure medications because, just before the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns began in early 2020, she hadsuffered the first of several epileptic seizures.
Torres alleged that the medication left Gutierrez’s mental health spiraling downward. Gutierrez’ paranoid and delusional thinking included believing that people were watching her, that someone had hacked her digital accounts and that her husband had even taken a life insurance policy out on her and he wanted to kill her.
Torres claimed that Gutierrez “knew something was wrong, but she didn’t understand what was going wrong. It was her new reality.”
Price was not buying that argument. She told the jury that having a psychotic reaction to the type of anti-seizure medications that Gutierrez was taking is extremely rare.
Price said “You don’t get a pass because you have anxiety. You don’t get a pass because life is hard.”
Gutierrez and Zuna grew up together in the same Santa Ana neighborhood where the murder happened. Both of their parents lived in homes down the street. Like so many Santa Ana residents they grew up in Santa Ana and never left until Gutierrez killed Zuna.
Gutierrez will be in her 50’s sixteen years from now when she might be able to ask for parole.