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Miami-Dade jurors weigh death sentence in 2012 triple-killing case
Jurors are set to deliberate whether Alberto Sierra should be sentenced to death or life in prison for killing his wife and her two young daughters. The case’s surviving family member told jurors about the birthdays and holidays the family lost.
A Miami-Dade jury is expected to begin deliberating Tuesday on whether Alberto Sierra should receive the death penalty or life in prison for the 2012 killings of his wife, Gladys Machado, and her daughters, Julia, 6, and Daniela, 3.
Closing arguments were heard Monday. Prosecutors urged jurors to recommend death, while Sierra’s defense asked them to spare his life.
Sierra admitted to suffocating Machado and the girls with a grocery bag. Prosecutors said the family had planned to go shopping with him in November 2012. Machado and Sierra were separating, prosecutors said, and an argument over an accusation of infidelity preceded Sierra taking Machado and the children from a mall to an apartment.
State Attorney Abbe Rifkin told jurors Machado was bound and abused for hours while the girls witnessed much of what happened. Prosecutors also said Sierra sexually assaulted two of the victims.
Machado’s son, Micheal Padrino, survived because he stayed with his great-grandmother. Now 19, he told jurors he had expected more time with his family, including birthdays, holidays and ordinary days together.
“It might be hard. But it’s right. It’s just. And it’s time,” Rifkin said in urging a death recommendation.
Defense attorney Khurrum Wahid pointed to a brain injury Sierra suffered after being struck by a car as a child and asked jurors to consider his humanity. “We are here to remind you he is a human being,” Wahid said.
Florida law requires at least eight of the 12 jurors to recommend death for the jury to return that recommendation. The sentencing decision follows a case stemming from the deaths of three members of a South Florida family more than a decade ago.