Melissa Huckaby Indicted By Grand Jury

by digiburger

17 Aug
2009

This post sponsored by VINTAGE CHRISTMAS CARDS OldSchoolArts.com

Melissa Huckaby charged with murder and rape of Sandra Cantu.

A San Joaquin County criminal grand jury convened in secret last month to hear evidence in the Tracy, California, case of Melissa Huckaby, 28, accused of the horrific murder and rape of 8 year-old Sandra Cantu, and only today was their finding made public. It returned its indictment replacing Huckaby’s public preliminary hearing, in which a judge would have determined if there was sufficient evidence for her to go to trial on the charges.

She faces murder with three special circumstances, making her eligible for the death penalty if the prosecutor seeks it and she is found guilty as charged. Those special circumstances being: kidnapping, lewd and lascivious acts on a child and rape with a foreign object.

In another unrelated case, Huckaby has been charged with two counts of furnishing a harmful substance and one count of child endangerment. Police allege she drugged an unnamed 7 year-old girl, and Hayward man, Daniel Plowman.

Huckaby is the mother of Sandra’s close friend and playmate, and a Sunday school teacher whose grandfather is a church minister. It is alleged she loaded the little girl’s body into a suitcase and dumped it, where it was discovered on April 6, 2009, after Sandra had disappeared on March 27 same year, by farmworkers draining an irrigation pond near the Orchard Estates Mobile Home Park, where the Huckaby and Cantu families lived.