SANTA ANA — A decade after a woman’s body was left in a Santa Ana business park, the Mammoth Lakes man convicted of raping and strangling her was sentenced Friday, Oct. 6, to 25 years to life in prison.

Family members in an emotional sentencing hearing described the still acute pain 25-year-old Yacshicka Watts’ violent death has caused them and urged the judge to make sure Jose Esteban Cardenas Zuniga, the man convicted of killing her, spends the rest of his life behind bars.

“He had no remorse when he was raping my daughter, when he was strangling her… he did it, and he felt nothing,” said Roynal Watts, Yacshicka Watts’ father. “As a man of God, I have to forgive. But I can’t forget the pain he has caused me and my family.”

Zuniga’s court-appointed attorney, Mitch Timbanard, acknowledged during the trial his client had sex with Watts, but denied he killed her. Zuniga, testifying during his trial through an interpreter, said he was “being accused of something I didn’t do, and I don’t even know what happened.”

In the early morning hours of Oct. 20, 2007, transients found Watts’ body in a parking lot in the 2300 block of West 2nd Street, laying in the midst of leaves and refuse. Investigators learned that Watts, who at the time was working as a prostitute, had been staying at a nearby Days Inn on Harbor Boulevard.

A man seen on camera leaving Watts’ hotel room, as well as the suspected pimp who admitted to dropping her off in the area, were both cleared by police.

The case went cold until 2013, when semen found on Watts’ body and pants was matched through DNA to Zuniga after he was arrested by another agency on an unrelated charge. Santa Ana investigators soon discovered that at the time of Watts’ death, Zuniga had been living at a home on 10th Street in Santa Ana, less than a mile from where her body was found.

Watts’ family, many of whom attended each day of the trial, remembered her as a loving, devoted mother who studied to become a certified nursing assistant while raising her young sons.

“The young lady who has been depicted in this court is a stranger to me,” said Ana Neal Negrete, Watts’ mother. “I remember her as my baby girl, with love in her heart.

“She matters. She was a mother, a sister, a daughter, a friend.”

Zuniga, now 41, listened through a Spanish language interpreter, often with his eyes closed, as the family struggled through tears to speak and comforted each other in the audience.

“I’m so sorry for the loss the family endured,” Timbanard said at Friday’s hearing. “I just wish I was as comfortable that justice has been served.”