Man gets 24-year term in slaying of stepdaughter in D.C.

José Andrade stood before a D.C. Superior Court judge Wednesday and read from a red and pink Father's Day card his little sister Marisol Caceres had given their stepfather. "I love you Papi," the girl had written.

A month later, the stepfather, Antonio Caceres, beat and strangled Marisol, 12, in their Northeast Washington home in the unit block of Hawaii Avenue NE.

After hearing from Andrade and other members of Marisol's family, Judge Frederick H. Weisberg sentenced Caceres to the maximum, 24 years in prison. Caceres, 45, is to be deported to Honduras after serving his sentence.

In September, Caceres pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in Marisol's slaying. On July 29, 2008, Marisol's body was found on her living room floor, partially clothed and with a plastic bag over her head, knotted at the base. Caceres was arrested four days later.

Even after the guilty plea, questions remained. There was no sign of sexual assault. And Caceres says he has no memory of what happened. So no one knows what caused Caceres to attack the girl he had known since she was an infant and who had showered him with Christmas and Father's Day cards. The plastic bag found around Marisol's head was from the Staples store where Caceres had taken Marisol to buy school supplies the day before.

Andrade said that his six siblings looked up to their stepfather as an attentive man who could fix anything that broke around the house. "He was an amazing man," Andrade said.

But Andrade's calm demeanor evaporated and his voice became angry when he talked about his sister's strangulation. "How could you do that to her?" he yelled, facing Caceres, who was in shackles standing among his attorneys, a Spanish-speaking interpreter and U.S. marshals.

Through an interpreter, Marisol's mother, Bertha, said she and Caceres had been together for 12 years and described Caceres as a "good husband and a good father." But now, she said, her family has been "ruined."

As family members and Marisol's teacher spoke in court, Caceres never looked up from the floor until one of Marisol's oldest sisters, Sabrina, spoke and held up a poster-size school picture of a smiling Marisol.

"I ask you to forgive me," Caceres said.

"I can't forgive you," she shouted back to him.

"I don't understand how or why I did it," Caceres later told the judge. "I am not a monster."

Caceres's attorneys said their client was depressed and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Shortly after he was arrested, Caceres was put on suicide watch at the D.C. jail.

Eric Klein, Caceres's attorney with the District's Public Defender Service, asked Weisberg to sentence his client to the 12-year minimum.

Klein said Caceres had battled years of depression and frustration, caused by financial problems and stress as he tried to support his family in the United States and send money to his five children in Honduras. On the day Marisol was killed, Klein said, Caceres snapped.

"He had pushed everything down for so long, and in one terrible moment, it came up," Klein said.

But John Soroka, an assistant U.S. attorney, called Caceres a "manipulator" whose story kept changing.

"We'll never know what happened in that apartment, other than he murdered a little girl who called him her father," Soroka said.