When Sara Sanchez came home from her graveyard shift at UMC one Wednesday morning and found her husband gone, she wasn't too concerned.
Sometimes he left for work early and other times he stayed out drinking or using drugs.
When Andres Sanchez didn't show up to work or return her many texts and voicemail messages, though, Sanchez filed a missing-person report at 7 o'clock that night.
Moments later, she received a text from her 38-year-old husband saying he had left her for another woman and wasn't coming back.
He told her to tell their four daughters he loved them, and his van could be picked up at a nearby bar.
Larry Raymundo Coronado, her 16-year-old daughter's boyfriend, went with her to pick up the van. He was there for the family if they needed him, Sanchez said he told her.
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He also said what her husband had done was "pretty messed up," Sanchez said.
What Sanchez didn't know then, prosecutors say, was her husband was already dead at the hands, prosecutors say, of Coronado.
Wednesday was the first day in Coronado's first-degree murder trial in Pima County Superior Court.
Deputy Pima County Attorney Julie Sottosanti told jurors that Coronado's girlfriend, Clarissa Sanchez, let Coronado into the family home in the early morning of Oct. 20, 2010, and Coronado beat Andres Sanchez to death with an aluminum bat while he lay sleeping.
The couple cleaned up the crime scene together, dumped Andres Sanchez in the desert near South La Cholla Boulevard and West 36th Street and sent numerous texts to his wife pretending to be him, Sottosanti said.
The victim's body was found not far from an elementary school after Clarissa Sanchez confessed to her older sister, Monica, on Oct. 31, 2010. Both Clarissa and Coronado also confessed to police, Sottosanti said.
Coronado agreed to kill Andres Sanchez out of his "obsessive love" for Clarissa, Sottosanti said, after the parents told the couple they could no longer date.
Defense attorney George Erickson told jurors his client made some bad choices that morning, but murder wasn't one of them.
"When he got to the house that day and the deed was done, he knew what he had to do," Erickson said.
He helped clean up the scene, dispose of the body and took the victim's phone, Erickson said.
And when he was arrested, Coronado told the police to let him take the blame.
Judge Paul Tang is presiding over the trial, which continues this morning.
Clarissa Sanchez, who is also charged with first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder, is scheduled to enter a plea agreement Friday.
On StarNet: Follow the news and events at Pima County's courthouses in Kim Smith's blog, At the Courthouse, at go.azstarnet.com/courthouse
Contact reporter Kim Smith at 573-4241 or kimsmith@azstarnet.com
