SANTA ANA – A woman whose badly burned body was found abandoned in an Irvine parking lot nearly seven years ago has never been identified – but the trial for a Santa Ana man accused of strangling her and setting her aflame began Wednesday.

Zenaido Baldivia-Guzman, 30, is one of two brothers accused of murdering the woman after kidnapping her from the streets of Santa Ana on Sept. 4, 2009, and leaving her body to be discovered the next morning in an industrial park near Alton Parkway.

With no identification of the body and no witnesses, Irvine investigators were initially left with little to go on.

But a match on DNA found underneath one of the woman’s fingernails led them to Zenaido Baldivia-Guzman and then his brother, Gabino.

During opening statements Wednesday afternoon, Deputy District Attorney Cynthia Herrera told the jury that Gabino Baldivia-Guzman was the driver while Zenaido grabbed the woman and pulled her into a truck.

“He kidnapped her, he beat her, he strangled her to death,” the prosecutor said about Zenaido Baldivia-Guzman. “Then they dumped her like trash in a parking lot, set her on fire and fled.”

Herrera said that Zenaido Baldivia-Guzman, during an interview with police, acknowledged that he and his brother had gone out to “get a girl.”

Herrera said he told the detectives that the girl “freaked out” in the back of the van and he tried to calm her, at one point putting a hand on her neck.

The prosecutor said that Zenaido Baldivia-Guzman told the investigators that when the woman stopped screaming they dropped her off, adding that it was his brother who decided to douse her in gasoline and light her on fire.

Orange County Public Defender Seth Bank, representing Zenaido Baldivia-Guzman, agreed that the woman’s death was “tragic, senseless and unjust.”

However, Bank said he has as a dramatically different interpretation about what his client told investigators and what happened the night of the killing, and that those details will come out during the trial.

Bank said Gabino Baldivia-Guzman owned the auto- and boat-detailing company that his younger brother worked for. While the older brother met with clients and worked out contracts, Zenaido Baldivia-Guzman did manual labor.

Zenaido Baldivia-Guzman’s DNA ended up in a law-enforcement database after a domestic violence incident with his then-wife, Bank noted.

Gabino Baldivia-Guzman faces the same murder and kidnapping charges as Zenaido, and is being tried separately. If convicted, both brothers face a life sentence without the possibility of parole.

Contact the writer: semery@ocregister.com