Woman Testifies Lying About Affair to Stop Beatings

VAN NUYS — Hoping to end months of daily beatings, a woman falsely told her jealous boyfriend that she was having an affair, leading the man to ambush the purported lover, the woman testified Wednesday.

In chilling detail, Adriana Casillas told a Van Nuys Superior Court jury that her live-in boyfriend, Jose Hernandez, planned the attack, slashed the man’s throat and then forced her to lick the victim’s blood from his fingers.

Hernandez is facing an attempted murder charge stemming from the Nov. 29, 1992, attack. The 25-year-old Van Nuys man also is accused of spousal abuse and assault with a deadly weapon for allegedly threatening Casillas with a knife.

The victim, Gustavo Mena, now 25, survived a deep wound to his neck but nearly died, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Steven J. Ipsen.

Although Casillas and Mena worked together at a K mart store, Casillas said the two were not involved romantically.

Casillas, who turns 20 today, testified that she arranged a meeting in which Mena was to be abducted but said she cooperated with Hernandez, with whom she has a 3-year-old daughter, strictly out of fear.

“I was scared,” Casillas repeatedly told the court.

Casillas moved in with Hernandez in 1988. She said the beatings started almost immediately.

She lured Mena to a dark Van Nuys street near Magnolia and Van Nuys boulevards, where Hernandez and three accomplices attempted to kidnap him, she said. But the plan went awry.

“For my mother, please don’t hurt me,” the victim screamed in Spanish as he fell to his knees and put his hands together as if praying, Casillas said.

When Mena refused to get into a pickup truck, Hernandez slashed the man’s throat.

Mena ran away, screaming for help, Casillas said.

Hernandez chased down his victim, brought him to the ground, “picked up his head and slashed him again,” the woman testified.

But on cross-examination by defense attorney Ronald Allen, Casillas admitted that she did not see the knife plunge into Mena. She said she based much of her testimony on statements made by Hernandez after the crime.

Hernandez’s original plan, according to Casillas, was to make her shoot Mena and record the slaying on videotape. She was to do the killing “to prove my love to him and to make me clean,” Casillas testified, adding that her boyfriend planned to pin the attack on her if police became involved.

After the stabbing, Hernandez drove Casillas and his three friends back to the couple’s apartment. After declining an offer to smoke cocaine, Casillas was ordered to the bedroom, where she watched the four men smoke marijuana and crack cocaine and scan the television for reports of the attack, she testified.

After the visitors left, Hernandez demanded sex, Casillas said, and when she refused, he beat her again.

“He tied me up,” Casillas testified. “He put a knife to my neck. He was pushing it in.”

The three accomplices, one of whom allegedly beat Mena with a baseball bat, have not been apprehended.