COMPTON, Calif. (AP) - Two Southern California teenagers have been sentenced for an ambush that killed the girl’s mother and stepfather.
City News Service says 17-year-old Cynthia Alvarez was given 51 years to life on Friday. Her boyfriend, 18-year-old Giovanni Gallardo, received life without chance of parole.
Separate juries convicted them of first-degree murder for the October 2011 attacks at the family’s Compton mobile home. The girl’s mother was strangled and her stepfather was struck with a baseball bat and choked.
Alvarez was 15 at the time and Gallardo was 16.
Alvarez testified that the couple stole the victims’ jewelry and truck parts to fund a Halloween party. They went to a party supply store with her dead mother in the back of the car.
Both bodies were later found in shallow graves.
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