The 8-month-old’s father was sentenced to 25 years to life for murder.
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Raina’s grandfather told a Santa Clara County court that the 8-month-old was deeply loved and should still be alive before her father was sentenced to 25 years to life for murder.
The victim impact statement became one of the final public records in the prosecution of Jesse Manuel Figueroa, the San Jose father convicted of killing Raina in 2020. A judge imposed the sentence May 29 after jurors found Figueroa guilty earlier this year. Prosecutors said the case proved that Raina died from a violent blow while she was in her father’s care, not from the sudden unexplained collapse he first described to police.
“Raina mattered. Her life mattered,” her grandfather wrote in the statement read for sentencing. He said she was not just a name in a case file, but a baby who was loved and should still be here. Those words stood beside the medical record that drove the criminal case. Prosecutors said Figueroa struck Raina across the face and head with such force that her brain shifted inside her skull. The injury caused brain hemorrhages, and an autopsy ruled the death a homicide.
Raina was 8 months old on July 4, 2020, when Figueroa brought her unconscious to a Mountain View fire station. He told police he had been taking her to a family barbecue when she suddenly lost consciousness and blood began seeping from her nose. Firefighters got the baby to emergency care, and she was transported to Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford. Doctors spent days trying to save her. During that treatment, prosecutors said, a bruise developed on the left side of her face in the shape and size of an adult hand.
The physical evidence gave investigators a different timeline than the one Figueroa gave. Prosecutors said he had been babysitting Raina and claimed he noticed nothing wrong before her collapse. The autopsy showed blunt force trauma to the head. The medical examiner found the blow was strong enough to move Raina’s brain inside her skull. That conclusion became a central part of the trial. Jurors also heard evidence that Figueroa had abused other members of the household, including Raina’s mother and the couple’s two older children.
Prosecutors said Figueroa had repeatedly beaten and strangled Raina’s mother. They said he also abused the older children, who were ages 2 and 3 at the time, including by making them kneel on rice. At the time Raina was killed, Figueroa was under a restraining order that prohibited him from having unsupervised visits with her. The District Attorney’s Office said he convinced Raina’s mother to let him watch the baby alone so he could take her to the family barbecue. The public record does not identify the mother or the surviving children by name.
District Attorney Jeff Rosen framed the sentence around the child Raina would have become. He said she would have been 6 years old at the time of sentencing instead of a name in a murder case. “These cases break our hearts, at the brutality, at the senselessness, at the sheer loss of an innocent child,” Rosen said. He said the county could feel some sense of justice because Figueroa would not hurt another child. The statement marked both the punishment and the distance between Raina’s infancy and the age she would have reached.
The case took nearly six years to move from the holiday emergency to sentencing. Raina died days after she was taken to the hospital. The autopsy finding turned the death investigation toward homicide. Prosecutors built the case from the medical findings, Figueroa’s statements, the cheek bruise, the restraining order and testimony about prior family violence. A jury convicted him of murder earlier in 2026. The May 29 sentencing set the prison term and completed the trial-level case in Santa Clara County Superior Court.
In court, the family’s statement did not add a new legal charge or medical fact. It added a measure of who was lost. Raina was remembered as a baby, not as evidence. Her grandfather’s words made the sentencing about more than the force of the blow or the number of years in prison. They placed her life at the center of the record, where prosecutors said it belonged. The sentence means Figueroa faces life in prison, with parole eligibility only after 25 years.
The case now stands with a murder conviction, a life sentence and a public record that identifies Raina’s death as a homicide caused by her father. Any later proceedings would come through the normal post-conviction process, but the sentencing set the punishment on May 29.
Author note: Last updated June 29, 2026.