California woman on trial for killing her husband on his birthday blames seizure medication

A wife stabbed her husband to death the morning of his birthday in 2021 as he lay in bed at their Santa Ana home, a prosecutor told jurors on Tuesday at the outset of the woman’s murder trial.

A defense attorney acknowledged that Michelle Gutierrez, then 32, killed her husband — 38-year-old Cesar Reyes Zuna — at their home in the 1000 block of West Bishop Street but blamed the slaying on mental issues related to medication she had been taking to help prevent seizures.

Senior Assistant District Attorney Susan Price during opening statements in a Santa Ana courtroom told jurors that as her husband slept, Gutierrez grabbed two knives from their kitchen, entered their bedroom, locked the door and began stabbing him repeatedly, including on his neck and in the back as he fell out of the bed.

The couple’s two children — then 9 and 10 years old — were in the home at the time but did not witness the killing. The kids heard their father scream and apparently tried to get into their parents’ room by kicking, hitting and attempting to use Nerf guns on the locked door. Police arrived to find an “incredibly graphic scene,” Price told the Orange County Superior Court jury, with “blood everywhere.”

The prosecutor said Gutierrez and Zuna’s marriage was “in a fractured state” leading up to the killing. In a journal later found by police, Gutierrez allegedly wrote that she had lied and cheated on her husband and suspected he had done the same.

“She felt desperate,” Price said. “Her marriage was going to fall apart and she was going to lose her kids, she believed. She had a distance from her husband she never felt before. She didn’t know what else to do.”

The wife told first responders that she was sorry for killing her husband, the prosecutor said, and that she had tried to take her own life.

Gutierrez’s attorney, Deputy Public Defender Jazmine Torres, told jurors that Gutierrez is a loving, non-violent person who did not plan the killing of her husband.

In early 2020 — around the time the COVID pandemic and lockdowns began — Gutierrez had suffered her first epileptic seizure. For six months leading up to her husband’s death, the defense attorney said, Gutierrez had struggled with side effects to medication she was taking and with a lack of insurance and getting medical attention due to pandemic restrictions.

“Her mental health was quickly spiraling,” Torres told jurors. “All she was trying to do was get help. She became paranoid. She began to think people were following her, that her phone was being tapped, that Cesar was going to kill her.”

Torres during her opening statement did not outline what happened the day of the killing. But the defense attorney told jurors that Gutierrez at the time did not have the mental state required to commit a murder.