Girl’s Killer Re-Sentenced

The murderer of 9-year-old Jenny Kao was re-sentenced Friday to 25 years to life in prison after the state Court of Appeal overruled an initial term of life without the possibility of parole.

Authorities said Daniel K. Barrera, 21, abducted the girl while she was selling candy to raise money for a school project near her uncle’s food stand in the Pasadena Plaza in March, 1982. He molested her in a freight elevator and mutilated her before throwing her into a trash bin, officials said.

Her body was found eight days later in a Glendale garbage dump.

The district attorney’s office sought the death penalty for Barrera, who has a history of sex crimes involving children.

But the Pasadena Superior Court jury, which convicted Barrera of murder with the “special circumstance” of child molestation, decided that a penalty of life in prison without possibility of parole was warranted.

After the sentence was imposed in 1983, however, the California Supreme Court ruled that special circumstances in a murder committed in the course of a felony such as child molestation can not be proven unless it is shown that a murder was specifically intended.

In Barrera’s case, it was not clear whether the girl died in the elevator during the assault or was crushed to death later by a compactor in a truck carrying trash from the mall to the dump.