Time and a team of U.S. and Mexican authorities finally caught up with a Texas mom who has been on the run as a fugitive for almost three decades after being indicted for killing her three-year-old daughter in the 1990s.
Maria Narez, now 48, has been arrested in Mexico for allegedly fatally injuring her daughter, Kasandra White, in November of 1996 by “shaking, beating and then throwing her” against a wall in her Fort Worth home, the New York Post reported.
She was a teen mom at the time.
A Tarrant County a grand jury first indicted her in 1997 for capital murder, according to several news reports.
“However, after a judge reduced her bond to $25,000, Narez failed to appear for court proceedings later that year. A warrant was issued for her arrest in late 1997 after her bond was forfeited, but she left the country and remained a fugitive for nearly 30 years,” Fox 4 in Dallas reported.
The Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office said she was also indicted on capital murder charges in 1999, well after she fled.
“The DA’s office never gave up on bringing Narez back to face the charge against her and answer for the death of her daughter,” a statement from that office said.
What the fugitive mom has been doing for 29 years has not yet been revealed.
Narez was a 19-year-old grocery store clerk in 1996 when she allegedly threw the child against a wall after she refused to go to bed, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported.
According to that newspaper’s account:
Narez told police that she was depressed and stressed when she told Kasandra White that it was time for bed. Narez said she got mad when the 3-year-old refused. “It angered her. She picked the baby up by the chest under her arms, threw her into a wall, and her head struck the door edge,” Fort Worth Police Department Sgt. Fred Pendergraf told the Star-Telegram in 1996.
Kasandra started crying and said, ‘It hurts,’ and went to bed,” Pendergraf said. Narez was jailed on Nov. 13, 1996, after taking Kasandra to a hospital when the child lost consciousness a day after she was injured in an apartment in the 2500 block of Park Hill Drive, police said. Kasandra died three days later.
Narez is due to be extradited from Mexico to face capital murder charges in Tarrant County.
In its statement, the county DA’s office thanked “Mexico Interpol, the U.S. Marshals Mexico Foreign Field Office, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Department of Justice-Office of International Affairs, DA Investigators Tiffany Johnson and Victor Espino-Nevarez, and Assistant DA Steven Elliott for their work in capturing Narez.”
“Their tireless work ensures this decades-old case was not forgotten — and neither was the pursuit of justice,” the statement concluded.
Breitbart News contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times true crime best seller House of Secrets, which documents one of the worst cases of child sex abuse in U.S. history, and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more