The parents of Sierra LaMar are speaking out about the emotional weight of enduring a second murder trial, nearly 14 years after the 15-year-old disappeared while walking toward a school bus stop in Morgan Hill.
The retrial of Antolin Garcia-Torres is continuing in San Jose. Garcia-Torres was found guilty of murdering Sierra in 2017, but an appeals court later threw out the verdict after determining that evidence of his past crimes had improperly influenced the jury. Sierra's body has never been found.
Sierra's mother, Marlene LaMar, said revisiting the events of March 16, 2012, has been devastating for the family, and that the passage of time has not made the trauma any easier to bear.
"It just seems like it never ends," Marlene LaMar said. "You know, you start to feel like you can get over it and then this happens. And it is not any less painful." She added that the disappearance affected Sierra's friends and family, saying, "we are all in shock that we have to be here today."
Sierra's father, Steve LaMar, also addressed the difficulty of returning to court, telling reporters the family is not thrilled about being there and that none of them wanted this. "We don't think it should be happening again, but there is not much we could do," he said.
Key testimony on Thursday came from Sierra's older sister, Danielle LaMar, who told jurors about the bond the two shared. "We were really close," she testified, describing the final time she saw her sister as an ordinary moment in which Sierra was "happy and content and just her usual self."
When prosecutors asked Danielle whether Sierra had ever mentioned a man in a red car, she said no. The red car remains central to the prosecution's case: prosecutors argue that DNA evidence shows Sierra was inside Garcia-Torres' red Volkswagen Jetta.
Late Thursday afternoon, Marlene LaMar took the witness stand to recount the morning her daughter disappeared. She testified that everything seemed normal and that the family followed its usual routine, saying she made sure Sierra was awake and getting ready to walk to the bus stop before leaving for work.
Marlene said she grew increasingly worried when Sierra did not answer text messages during the day. After learning that afternoon that Sierra was neither at school nor at home, she called 911.
Garcia-Torres is now facing a second trial in Sierra's disappearance and death, with proceedings taking place in Santa Clara County Superior Court.
