Teen Accused Of Killing Two, Including Her Mother, Held Without Bail, Cops Say It Was Not Self-Defense

The 15-year-old girl accused of killing two people, including her own mother, at the Sheepshead Bay Houses was arraigned in Brooklyn criminal court just before midnight on Monday and ordered to be held without bail, the New York Times reports.

Destiny Garcia has been charged with two counts of second-degree murder and two counts of illegal possession of a weapon for allegedly gunning down her mother and mother’s boyfriend at their apartment in the Sheepshead Bay Houses. The bodies were left to rot for almost a week before police discovered the corpses on Sunday. Both victims,38-year-old Rosie Sanchez and 40 year-old Anderson Nunez, were found in a blood-bathed apartment with multiple gunshot wounds, according to police.

Prosecutors told the judge that Nunez had been stabbed 30 times and that police had a video-taped confession of the teenager admitting to the murders, the Times reports.

Initially, the girl claimed that she had been sexually abused by Nunez, and that her mother would not do anything about it. However, police told the Daily News that Garcia changed her story during the interrogation and said she was physically assaulted by her mom and that the boyfriend refused to help.

Garcia’s cousin Jason Valentin, who alerted police to the murders, told the Daily News that he doesn’t buy the teen’s story.

“What she’s saying, I don’t think is true,” he reportedly said. “It sounds like someone coached her to say that.”

Garcia is being tried as an adult and police said the circumstances of the murders did not lead them to believe Garcia acted in self-defense.

“She said basically it was the mother that actually was abusive to her, physically abusive to her, in the past,” NYPD Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce told the Daily News. “We don’t believe this was at all an act of self-defense. She went and got a gun…. That’s not consistent with someone (acting) in self-defense.”

According to the Daily News:

Sources said Garcia told police she grabbed a gun out of a drawer in her mother’s bedroom and fired at least two bullets into Sanchez. Then she allegedly fired the gun at Nunez. It’s not known who the gun belonged to or how long it had been there.

During a struggle that spilled into the kitchen, Nunez grabbed the gun, but she stabbed him several times in the back, cops said.

Police believe the murders were committed on December 28 and that Garcia went to stay with her biological father after killing Sanchez and Nunez, the Daily News reports. She also reportedly partied in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

Cops are also searching for another teenager who may have entered the apartment at the time of the murders, the Daily News reports.

Cops reportedly recovered several .380-caliber bullet casings and two knives at the scene.