SAN ANTONIO – Sabrina Cavazos told a jury Tuesday that a day or so after 35-year-old Jose Luis Menchaca was beaten to death, she made a gruesome discovery in a tub inside the garage of the home where Menchaca was killed.
“I saw a body, and blood,” Cavazos testified. “There was a smell as if it had been sitting there and there were maggots.”
Cavazos said it was Menchaca’s body.
She was testifying in the murder trial of Daniel Lopez, 29, who is accused of beating Menchaca to death on Sept. 29, 2014.
Cavazos testified earlier that she had lured Menchaca to a bedroom in a home on Hillwood Street where Lopez and her boyfriend at the time, Gabriel Moreno, attacked him with baseball bats.
The fatal beating, she testified, was in retaliation for an alleged knife attack on Lopez by Menchaca a few days previously.
Cavazos said Moreno forced her to dispose of the blood and clean the tub. To do otherwise, she testified, would have been dangerous for her.
“He wouldn’t have let me walk away and I would’ve gotten beaten up,” she said.
Prosecutor Josh Somer asked Cavazos “Were you afraid?”
“Yes, I was afraid,” she answered
The men are accused of burying Menchaca’s body after dismembering it and trying to burn his arms and legs on a backyard barbecue grill.
On cross examination, Lopez’s attorney, J. Charles Bunk, grilled Cavazos extensively about everything from her testimony to her medical history in an apparent attempt to discredit her testimony.
Both Lopez and Moreno have previously been tried in Menchaca’s death. Both trials ended in a mistrial.
Moreno is jailed awaiting his second trial. Testimony in Lopez’s trial is set to continue Tuesday in Judge Ron Rangel’s 379th District Court.
A guilty verdict could mean a life prison sentence.
