Jessica Marie Tinoco’s daughters described the lasting consequences of the 2024 attack before Ramon Joseph Rivas received 51 years to life.
VENTURA, Calif. — The sentencing of Ramon Joseph Rivas for murdering Jessica Marie Tinoco centered not only on a 51-years-to-life prison term, but on the children who had been inside their Simi Valley home when their mother was attacked and who returned to court nearly two years later to describe what remained.
Tinoco’s daughters Kimberly and Mariah Gutierrez spoke directly about the night of Sept. 27, 2024, during the Aug. 7 sentencing hearing, according to Ventura County Star courtroom reporting. Kimberly recalled trying to stop the attack, while Mariah described getting her siblings out of the residence and calling for help. One daughter summarized the helplessness of seeing her mother taken from her while she could not stop what was happening. The statements provided the most personal public account of a case prosecutors had long described through charges, police observations, physical evidence and sentencing allegations.
After hearing from Tinoco’s family, the court sentenced Rivas, 36, to 51 years to life in state prison. He had pleaded guilty May 20 to second-degree murder and admitted numerous special allegations and aggravating factors, including use of a deadly weapon, a third-strike allegation, a prior serious or violent felony, a serious-felony prior and factors concerning the severity of the violence and Tinoco’s vulnerability. The Ventura County District Attorney’s Office had said at the time of the plea that 51 years to life was the maximum sentence he faced. The sentence imposed in August matched that figure.
The hearing represented a different phase of the case from the one Tinoco’s children encountered on the night their mother died. Then, the immediate task was escape and summoning police. Prosecutors have said the stabbing occurred in front of all five of Tinoco’s children and that they fled the home during the attack. Earlier police-based reporting said two of the children were present for the stabbing, including a daughter who made the 911 call. Those accounts differ on the number described as direct witnesses, but they agree that children were in the home, saw the violence and took action to get away and alert authorities.
Police reached the residence after the emergency call and found Rivas coming outside without a shirt and with blood on his upper torso, according to the District Attorney’s Office. Officers detained him and entered the home. Tinoco, 34, was found just inside the front door with multiple wounds. Authorities later said officers recovered a bent steak knife with blood on it from the living room and observed blood in other parts of the residence. Tinoco was taken to Los Robles Hospital, where she was pronounced dead. Prosecutors said four of her wounds were fatal.
Investigators reconstructed the immediate sequence as a domestic dispute that escalated into a killing. Witnesses told authorities that Rivas went into the kitchen, got a knife and attacked Tinoco, according to the prosecution’s account. The children then fled. The District Attorney’s Office has not publicly given a detailed explanation of what the argument concerned, and the sentencing announcement did not identify an underlying motive. That leaves the verified public account focused on what witnesses and officers said happened rather than on speculation about why Rivas chose to use deadly violence.
For Tinoco’s children, however, the sentencing hearing was less about reconstructing that sequence than about explaining its aftermath. Courtroom reporting said Kimberly remembered physically trying to intervene and pleading for the attack to stop. Mariah spoke about the family’s prior trust in Rivas and about removing the younger children from danger. Their grandmother also addressed him. The family’s statements described a loss that could not be measured solely through the prison term, and they made the hearing a record of the harm that survived long after police cleared the scene and prosecutors filed the case.
Rivas also spoke. He expressed regret and accepted responsibility for his actions, according to accounts of the hearing. Addressing two of Tinoco’s children who were present, he apologized. His statement did not change the prosecution’s position on punishment. Senior Deputy District Attorney John Barrick, who handled the case for the Major Crimes Homicide Unit, said Rivas’ acceptance of responsibility did not excuse what he had done to Tinoco and her family. The prosecutor had made the impact on the children a central part of the state’s public explanation of the case months earlier, when the guilty plea was announced.
That plea resolved a prosecution that began within days of the killing. The District Attorney’s Office initially charged Rivas with murder, two counts of child endangerment and strike enhancements in October 2024. Later court reporting described four child-endangerment counts, reflecting changes in the case as it moved through Superior Court. When Rivas accepted the plea agreement in May 2026, those remaining child-endangerment charges were set for dismissal at sentencing. He instead admitted second-degree murder and the package of special allegations and aggravating factors that exposed him to the lengthy indeterminate prison sentence.
The admitted factors also placed Rivas’ criminal history into the formal sentencing record. Prosecutors listed a third-strike allegation, a prior serious or violent felony, a serious-felony prior, previous convictions and a prior prison term. They also cited violent conduct, the degree of violence in the murder and Tinoco’s vulnerability. Those admissions distinguished the case from a second-degree murder conviction standing alone. The District Attorney’s Office did not publish a detailed sentencing worksheet allocating a specific number of years to every allegation, so the public record supports describing the factors Rivas admitted without assigning an unverified portion of the 51-year minimum term to each one.
The legal process also changed the status of facts that had first been presented as accusations. In October 2024, prosecutors alleged that Rivas had fatally stabbed Tinoco and charged him accordingly. At that point he was an accused defendant, and the case had not been adjudicated. His May 2026 guilty plea established his criminal responsibility for second-degree murder. By the August sentencing, the central question was no longer whether he committed the homicide but what punishment the court would impose under the plea and admitted allegations.
Tinoco’s identity in the case extended beyond the police description of a victim found near a front door. She was a mother of five whose children became witnesses, callers for help and, eventually, speakers at the sentencing of the person responsible for her death. Local reporting after the killing described relatives and community members grieving her loss. The courtroom statements nearly two years later showed how that initial public mourning had become part of a longer family experience, one that continued while the criminal case moved through hearings, plea negotiations and final sentencing.
The contrast between the children’s roles in September 2024 and August 2026 gave the sentencing its clearest through line. On the night Tinoco died, they were trying to escape an unfolding emergency. At sentencing, family members were able to speak in a controlled courtroom with Rivas in custody and the murder charge already resolved. Their statements could not change what happened, but they became part of the formal record considered before the court imposed the sentence.
Currently, Rivas is subject to a 51-years-to-life state-prison sentence for Tinoco’s murder. The District Attorney’s Office has not announced another substantive proceeding in the case. The criminal prosecution therefore ends with a lengthy prison term, while the final public hearing preserved the voices of the family members who had lived through the attack and its consequences from the beginning.
Author note: Last updated September 21, 2026.