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Trial to determine if Camacho competent
BROWNSVILLE — Angela Camacho has been slated for a competency trial on May 3 to determine if she is mentally fit to answer for the stabbing and beheading of her three children in a filth-ridden downtown apartment.
Angela Camacho is, 24, accused of helping her common-law husband suffocate, stab and behead her three young children.
If the jury in the 107th state District Court finds her incompetent, Camacho will be put in a state institution. She will periodically face similar trials until she is eventually found competent to stand trial.
The competency trial is unrelated to defense’s attempts to prove that Camacho is retarded and was insane during the March 11 murders, said defense attorney Ernesto Gamez. It will merely determine if Camacho, 24, is mentally fit to aid her attorneys in her defense, he said.
Her common-law husband, John Allen Rubio, 23, was sentenced to death in November for his role in the murders. He awaits an appeal date while sitting on death row in Huntsville.
Camacho is a Mexican national who bore at least one child with Rubio, court testimony revealed.
But the couple cared for the children together, raising them in a run-down apartment on Tyler Street — a block away from the court where she will stand trial.
In a statement that Camacho gave to police just after the murders, she said she saw a woman with the devil’s mark riding a Brownsville municipal bus before she and Rubio killed the children.
She also said she held down at least one child while Rubio stabbed and sawed off the heads of 3-year-old Julissa Quezada, 1-year-old Juan Esthefan Rubio and 2-month-old Mary Jane Rubio. The kitchen-knives were broken in the process.
Although Camacho was charged with the murders almost a year ago, her trial had been stalled as defense attorneys questioned the validity of a sanity test administered in May by Harlingen psychologist Dr. David Collier, who found that Camacho was sane when she committed the murders and understood right from wrong.
Camacho’s defense attorneys — Gamez and Alberto Pullen — are arguing that their client was insane when the murders were committed, and that Collier’s findings do not fit the legal definition of insanity.
The defense believes they have an added advantage because Camacho has scored below the retardation line in an IQ test. A score below 70 on an I.Q. test marks the legal line for retardation. The defense says that Camacho has scored a 67 on one IQ test, but it was not administered related to this case. The test is slated to be re-administered next week, Gamez said, and should seal defense’s claims of her retardation.
A landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2002 ruled that mentally retarded individuals cannot be sentenced to death.
Mexico has a vested interest in this case, said Mexican Consulate Juan Carlos Foncerrada.
Camacho is the first Mexican woman to possibly face the death penalty in the United States. Mexico does not have a death penalty, and such a sentence has delicate implications for international relations, Foncerrada said.
The Mexican government — through the Consulate’s office — is working with Camacho’s attorneys in her defense, he said.
Rubio pleaded insanity and said he believed the children were possessed by his dead grandmother’s soul. He said he learned from a movie that exorcism works best when the head of the possessed is severed.
Rubio also admitted to chronic huffing of spray paint, and a witness in his trial said he saw Rubio holding a can of spray at his front door the day of the murders.
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