23-year-old man accused of killing Sierra faces the death penalty
Published in the March 18-31, 2015 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Marty Cheek
Photo by Marty Cheek
Morgan Hill residents from left, Trudy Parks, and ‘kitchen ladies’ Vivian Goforth, Margaret Bianucci and Mary Malech have volunteered in the search for missing Sierra LaMar for three years. Organizers have suspended the search for the Sobrato High School student.
Sierra LaMar never came home.
In many ways, the day three years ago this week when the outgoing 15-year-old Sobrato High School cheerleader went missing forever changed the community of Morgan Hill. The ongoing search for the sophomore since her disappearance March 16, 2012 has brought many closer together as friends and neighbors.
Now, unless new information turns up indicating where Sierra’s remains are, the search is being temporarily suspended by the LaMar family and organizers. Saturday March 14, the last official search day, was a tender time for the searchers who have built a bond of friendship and family over the three years they have wandered together through fields, searched creeks and roads, and probed the bottom of reservoirs and lakes trying to find closure by bringing Sierra home.
Among the individuals whose life has been changed in the quest to find Sierra is Mary Doering. The Campbell resident joined the search as soon as it started because her heart was touched by the story of a family who had lost their daughter. Over the span of time, the search for Sierra has created a family in a spiritual sense for her and others, she said.
“All kinds of people came together and we all have one goal and that is to find this young girl and create a support system for this family to get through this horrific trauma,” Doering said. “She’s had an effect on all of us, no matter where we came from. Sierra is a child of God, she’s somebody’s daughter, she’s somebody’s sister. She’s a human being and she’s important.”
Getting involved with the Sierra LaMar search made Doering learn about crimes that can happen to children such as human trafficking. She joined the South Bay Coalition to End Human Trafficking and the group’s efforts have rescued 46 under-aged girls from a life in the sex trade industry, she said.
“This has all come about because of Sierra and the awareness of what could have happened to her,” she said. “We need to bring awareness that kids can be safe and avoid being lured in.”
The search for Sierra has also brought together people of varied generations. Among them is a group of women known affectionately as “the kitchen ladies” by the group. During search days, these senior citizens help feed the team of volunteers breakfast before going out for a search and lunch when they return. Among them is Vivian Goforth of Morgan Hill who realized she needed to get involved in the search when she saw a line of vehicles at least a mile long had formed of people who wanted to help find Sierra.
“I lived down the road and I saw all these cars and so I stopped to see if I could help. They asked what I could do,” Goforth said.
Soon she found herself in the search center’s kitchen preparing pastries, fruit, sandwiches, and drinks with several other Morgan Hill women including Margaret Bianucci, Loretta Wilson, and Mary Malech. The kitchen ladies wear red and white Converse shoes in honor of Sierra who favored this type of footwear.
“We just showed up wanting to help and cooking was what we were capable of doing. We’re not going to be climbing over rocks,” Malech said with a grin.
Photo by Marty Cheek
Volunteers adopted wearing red and white Converse shoes in honor of Sierra who favored this type of footwear.
The search for Sierra during the past 36 months since she disappeared on her way to her school bus stop has transformed people not just in Morgan Hill but throughout the Bay Area region and even beyond, said Roger Nelson, a Gilroy resident who has helped direct volunteer search efforts. The volunteers have been dedicated in the search, coming together on hot summer days and rainy, cold winter days, scanning woods, ravines and thickets searching for Sierra’s remains. Some searchers have come from as far away as San Diego and other states.
Although as many as 750 people initially turned out for the search when Sierra went missing, for the last year or so a core group of about two dozen dedicated volunteers continue the quest. The search team volunteers have gone on 1,130 separate searches in a 15-mile radius from the site in north Morgan Hill where Sierra was last seen. They’ve put in more than 50,000 combined hours.
“I would say it brings out the best in people,” Nelson said. “We’ve all come to know each other. And I know that people will stay in touch and friendships will continue from here after. Sierra brought us together.”
At first, the search took place three days a week, but over time it was reduced to only Saturday mornings. And the searchers have been following the court case of Morgan Hill resident Antolin Garcia Torres, 23, the man the Santa Clara County District Attorney believes abducted Sierra LaMar based on DNA material criminalists found on Sierra’s clothing and in Garcia Torres’s 1998 VW Jetta. Searchers who attend the court hearings describe Garcia Torres’s facial appearance as “angry” and “disturbing” as he glares at them and media cameras. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. The judge has postponed setting a trial date. Garcia Torres is expected back in court April 8.
Marlene LaMar, Sierra’s mother, does not go to court proceedings. She focuses on the positive aspects of how the search brings strangers together to become friends.
“I believe that all the searchers are very passionate about the mission,” she said. “It’s like a battle, you know, against the things that can happen in the world today. It forms fellowship and solidarity in the war against evil.”
Marlene wants people to remember her daughter as a vibrant young woman who loved people and lived her life to the fullest. At a February court meeting for Garcia Torres, she said, one of the searchers held a sign that read “Sierra matters.” And that message should never be forgotten as the process of justice proceeds, Marlene said.
Sierra loved to sing and dance. She would imitate female rap artists. And she was also an accomplished performer at the Yoko’s Dance Studio in Fremont where her radiant personality and smile often put her in the front of the dance line.
On the week of her disappearance, Sierra was planning to write an essay for one of her Sobrato classes about depression and suicide, Marlene said.
“A week and a half before she was abducted, she had some friends who had depression issues, and she told me, ‘You know mom, I have a gift, and that gift is lifting my friends up when they’re really depressed,’” Marlene said. “‘I believe God gave me that gift.’”
That characteristic of compassion started at an early age. In second grade, Marlene remembers, Sierra helped one of her fellow students who was deaf and had trouble talking. Some of the other children ostracized the boy, but Sierra stepped in and helped tutor him.
“She’s very free-spirited,” the mother said about her daughter. “She speaks her mind and she’s very righteous for causes that are not just within the U.S. but things that happen in third world countries such as the sex trafficking, the stuff that happens in Africa where they kidnap the kids and use them for the warlord armies. She has a lot of compassion for stuff like that… And she is goofy, lighthearted and goofy.”
Sierra’s father Steve LaMar described his daughter as always laughing and seeing the fun in life with her friends and her older sister, Danielle LaMar.
“She was a happy-go-lucky girl with her friends, always joking around with her friends,” he recalled. “She was always goofing around. She had a lot of close friends at school, and was always doing things with them. And at home she had a great relationship with Danielle. They would make fun at things I would do.”
Marlene notes that Sierra has given many people she never knew a great gift. Hundreds of people over the past three years have found a purpose and a peace in their search for the missing Sobrato student.
“It’s brought together people who have gone through tragedy themselves. It helps them go outside the box and into their comfort zone and be a part of something greater and helps them heal,” she said. “It helps them plant a lot of seeds and heal wounds.”
On a misty day in March three years ago, Sierra LaMar never came home. In their quest to find closure for her family, Sierra’s searchers have come together and created a family that seeks to bring her home.
Editor’s note: In our April 1 issue we will write about the last search for Sierra before they were suspended.
