Prosecutors: Woman Ended Relationship By Stabbing Girlfriend 46 Times
OGDEN, Utah (AP) - Victoria Ashley Mendoza and her girlfriend had a volatile five-year relationship that ended violently last October when she stabbed Tawnee Baird dozens of times in her car, leaving her with 46 stab wounds, prosecutors said Friday.
Judge Joseph Bean ordered Mendoza, 22, to stand trial on a murder charge after a graphic hearing that ended with Mendoza threatening suicide as she was led from the courtroom. She pleaded not guilty.
"I'll just kill myself. Then you don't have to worry about me," Mendoza yelled. She cried during the hearing, holding her head in her hands.
"These two young women circled around each other and nobody else," prosecutor Ben Willoughby said.
Defense lawyer Michael Studebaker said the stabbing should be tried in another county because Mendoza told police it happened while the women were driving on Interstate 15. Bean disagreed. After the hearing, Studebaker said he's considering asking a federal court to intervene in the case.
"The evidence is overwhelming that everything occurred in Davis County," he said. Baird was last seen alive dropping off a friend in Centerville, north of where the couple lived in the Salt Lake City suburb of Holladay.
Mendoza's sister, Cindy Spencer, testified Friday the women used marijuana and prescription drugs. Both were jealous and controlling, she said, and got into fights that escalated into hitting, kicking and punching.
The night of Baird's death, Mendoza called her sister and said she'd hurt her girlfriend and asked Spencer to come to the church they'd attended growing up. When Spencer arrived, she saw Baird, 21, dead in the passenger seat in a car covered in blood.
After her arrest, Mendoza told police she pulled a 4-inch folding knife from her front pocket and stabbed Baird after a fight about a man turned to punching and hair-pulling, Ogden police Detective Travis Gerfen said.
None of the individual stab wounds looked fatal, chief state medical examiner Todd Grey said. Baird likely died of shock and blood loss in an attack that Gray called "fairly rageful."
Toxicology tests showed that both women had smoked marijuana shortly before the killing, but the tests didn't show the presence of other drugs.
Prosecutors acknowledged it's unclear exactly what happened in the car. While Mendoza initially said that she'd been driving at the time of the stabbing, the stab wounds were on right the right side of Baird's body, and a swipe of blood on the dashboard showed she moved from the driver's seat to the passenger's seat, police said.
Before she called her sister, Mendoza called two other friends and told them about the killing, prosecutors said. They made a video recording of the conversation, and it was played in court Friday.
"'I'm really sorry for this, but I didn't know what else to do. I'm freaking suffocated,'" she said, according to the recording.
Mendoza once interrupted graphic testimony about the wounds that Baird suffered to say she needed to go to the holding cell because the victim's father would kill her. She eventually calmed down, and the hearing continued.
The victim's father, Casey Baird, said Mendoza was close to the family and said the relationship had looked healthy to him.
"I didn't know," he said. "It's eating me up, my little girl, my precious girl, being stabbed violently like that."
Copyright 2015 The Associated Press.
