A man who killed his still-missing 27-year-old girlfriend and her unborn child after an argument at their San Jacinto home was sentenced Friday, May 17, to the maximum of 11 years in state prison for a voluntary manslaughter conviction.
A Banning jury in March found Angel Martine McIntire, 29, of Beaumont guilty of one count of voluntary manslaughter and acquitted him of two counts of first-degree murder.
McIntire was arrested in 2022 after a nearly two-year Riverside County sheriff’s investigation into the disappearance of Diana Perez Gonzalez.
According to a trial brief filed by the District Attorney’s Office, McIntire and Gonzalez had a conflicted relationship that began in August 2018. McIntire and Gonzalez moved in together, but within a year, he became abusive, prompting Gonzalez, who was pregnant with their daughter, to obtain a restraining order against him and to move out of their shared residence in December 2019, according to the brief.
The abuse inflicted on the woman culminated in a domestic violence conviction against McIntire. However, because the two had a baby together, they continued to communicate, ultimately resulting in her welcoming the defendant into her home in the 3000 block of Crooked Branch Way in the fall of 2020, the brief said.
Gonzalez then became pregnant again, which fueled discord, and McIntire again turned physically abusive, according to court papers.
On Dec. 4, 2020, with Gonzalez eight weeks pregnant, investigators theorize McIntire attacked her, inflicting fatal injuries, though the method remains unknown.
According to the brief, relying on mobile phone signal pings and social media activity, detectives were able to track McIntire’s movements that day, which took him through Cherry Valley, Beaumont, Gilman Springs, Aguanga, Cahuilla, Palm Desert and back home. At one point during the circuit, he dropped his and the victim’s daughter at his mother’s home in Beaumont, telling her that he didn’t know where the victim was, relaying the same information to Gonzalez’s family over the following week, according to court papers.
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One of her relatives finally reported her missing on Dec. 11, 2020, and detectives immediately suspected foul play. However, McIntire was adamant in statements to detectives that he had no clue of his girlfriend’s whereabouts, suggesting she had returned to her native Mexico.
McIntire’s attorney, Daniel DeLimon, said he told jurors during the trial that there was not enough evidence to convict his client of murder.
“There was an absence of evidence as to where, when, how, and why she was murdered,” DeLimon said in an interview Friday. “The prosecution argued that those things didn’t matter as long as they believed he killed her and argued a killing under those circumstances could only be murder. They relied heavily on prior instances of domestic violence and his conduct after her disappearance. We argued there was insufficient evidence to show he did it and insufficient evidence to set what crime he committed.”
While someone can be charged with murder for the death of a fetus, DeLimon noted, there is no charge of manslaughter of a fetus, so there was no conviction related to the fetus’ death.
