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Sunday, Apr. 12, 2009

Tracy reeling from woman's arrest in girl's slaying

TRACY – Everybody was on the lookout for "the monster, the madman who would do this," the police spokesman said.

Instead, investigators said it was a neighbor – the mother of one of her best friends – who kidnapped and murdered 8-year-old wisp Sandra Cantu, then stuffed her little body in a suitcase and dumped it into a dairy drainage pond.

On Saturday, the day before Easter, Tracy police announced they had arrested and booked Melissa Chantel Huckaby, 28. As a Sunday school teacher, she ministers to the youngest of her pastor grandfather's flock at the city's Clover Road Baptist Church.

"Finding out it's a woman responsible for Sandra's kidnapping and murder, and finding out it's a member of the community is another blow, and finding out it was someone Sandra's family knew is a double blow," Tracy Police Sgt. Tony Sheneman told reporters Saturday.

"Our community will start to heal at some point," Sheneman added. "Today is going to be a very difficult day for everyone to be able to digest that."

Tracy Police Chief Janet Thiessen has said that the little girl was probably dead by the time she was reported missing March 27.

Authorities did not disclose how Sandra was killed or where the homicide took place. They also wouldn't say if Huckaby confessed, or why the crime even happened.

"I couldn't begin to theorize what her motive is," Sheneman said.

Sandra's aunt, Angie Chavez, said, "We are very glad that they apprehended someone for this."

A nine-person entourage that included Huckaby's grandfather, the Rev. Clifford Lane Lawless of the Clover Road church, descended on the San Joaquin County jail around 3 p.m. Saturday to visit her. The family members, who could not get in for a visit at that time, declined to comment on the arrest.

The victim and the suspect lived about 75 yards away from each other in the Orchard Estates Mobile Home Park, about two miles from the agricultural area where Sandra's body was found Monday.

Huckaby's 5-year-old daughter was "close friends" with Sandra, according to Sheneman. A surveillance videotape filmed the day the girl disappeared showed her skipping across the street to the pastor's home where Huckaby also lived. Sheneman said Sandra "frequently" went over there to play.

Detectives served search warrants on several locations during the course of the investigation. One focus of the probe has been the Clover Road church, just a quarter-mile down the street from the mobile home park. On Friday, investigators searched the church for a second time, and it was that night around 6 o'clock when the case broke.

It came when Huckaby drove into the Tracy police station "on her own accord," Sheneman said, for her second interview with police.

"She walked in the front door of the Police Department and started a conversation with our investigators," Sheneman said. "During the course of the conversation, she was calm, cool and collected, and then became very emotional, and was calm again, and then became resigned."

By 11:15 p.m. Friday, Huckaby had said enough for police to book her for murder. The interview continued until 1:30 a.m. Saturday. Sheneman said that at 2:15 a.m., detectives called Sandra's family with the news.

"They were in disbelief," the sergeant said.

The arrest prompted outrage as well as disbelief and once again evoked a realization that even bedroom communities of 80,000 such as Tracy, where thousands of commuters cross the Altamont Pass every day to go to work in the Bay Area, are not immune from the worst of big-city ills.

"We are getting bigger," said Michael Cain, 54, a decadelong Tracy resident, as he rode his bike Saturday past the Clover Road church. "We can't have a small-town mentality anymore."

At the mobile home park, Sandra's uncle, Joe Chavez, shared the anger felt by a family that won't get to see see a part of its future grow up.

"What was she teaching in Sunday school?" Chavez said of Huckaby. "About God and love? How to treat your fellow human beings? What kind of Sunday school teacher was that?"

Elsewhere at the mobile home park, if there was any sense of relief that a suspected killer had been removed from the streets, it was outstripped by the stunning news of who had been arrested.

"To hear that it's someone from the church, in a position of trust, is shocking," said Rafael Palma, a park resident and himself a minister at the Apostolic New Life Center in Tracy. "I'm like everybody else, expecting this to be some creepy guy."

Natural fear that ripples through any neighborhood shaken by murder also ran through Orchard Estates, which police blocked off to visitors Saturday.

"Everybody is like not going outside no more," said 14-year-old Elizabeth Gonzalez.

Insights into the life and times of Melissa Chantel Huckaby were hard to come by. Carlos Martinez, a handyman who lives in the mobile home park, said she seemed to keep quiet, even when his own girl once told the suspect her daughter was cute.

"She didn't say anything," Martinez said. "I was thinking, 'How rude.' "

According to the Tracy Press, Huckaby's name popped up in the newspaper's search of San Joaquin County court records last week. Huckaby pleaded no contest in January to burglary and theft charges and also was convicted in Los Angeles County in 2006 on theft charges, according to the paper.

Huckaby denied in an interview with the paper Friday that the records referred to her.

In the same interview, she said she owned a suitcase that appears to match the one in which Sandra's body was found. Her explanation in the paper about the suitcase's disappearance from her grandparents' residence conflicted with what she told police in their original "canvass" of the case, according to Sheneman. It was those inconsistencies that led to her arrest, he said.

Huckaby said in the newspaper interview that she had set the suitcase in front of her house the day Sandra disappeared and that "someone took it." She did not say why she set the suitcase outside.

The suspect also told the paper she was hospitalized for several days last week with "internal bleeding."

In a case that carried at least $32,000 reward money, Sheneman said the cash was offered to the farmworkers who found the suitcase that contained the girl's body.

They refused to accept the money, Sheneman said.

Huckaby is scheduled for arraignment at 1:30 p.m. Tuesday in the San Joaquin Superior Court branch in Manteca.

TIMELINE

March 27: Sandra Cantu last seen alive at the Orchard Estates Mobile Home Park in Tracy. Search for the missing girl begins.

Monday, April 6: Farmworkers draining an irrigation pond two miles from her home find remains in a suitcase. Police identify remains as Sandra's based on clothing and begin search for her killer.

Tuesday, April 7: Investigators search the Clover Road Baptist Church where Melissa Huckaby taught Sunday school and where her grandfather is pastor.

Friday, April 10:

• Investigators search church a second time in the late afternoon.

• Huckaby drives herself to the Tracy Police Department and arrives between 6 and 7 p.m. for questioning.

• Police place Huckaby under arrest between 11 p.m. and midnight.

Saturday, April 11, 3:25 a.m.: Huckaby is booked into the San Joaquin County jail on charges of homicide and kidnapping.

Tuesday, April 14: Huckaby scheduled for arraignment in San Joaquin Superior Court in Manteca.

Thursday, April 16, 1 p.m.: Public memorial service scheduled for Sandra in the gymnasium at Merrill F. West High School, 1775 W. Lowell Ave., Tracy.