Man sentenced to die in deaths of stepchildren

Defense pleas about the Mexican national's abusive upbringing elicits no mercy from the court.

By CHRISTOPHER GOFFARD, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published May 29, 2002

TAMPA -- A judge sentenced Pedro Hernandez Alberto to death Tuesday for the murder of his two stepdaughters in January 1999, despite defense claims of an impoverished childhood in rural Mexico, a paranoid disorder and possible brain damage from a car accident.

Saying Alberto had acted in cold blood, Judge Chet A. Tharpe imposed two death sentences on Alberto, one for the murder of 11-year-old Donna Berezovsky and the other for the murder of 29-year-old Isela Gonzalez. Prosecutors said Alberto blamed the stepdaughters for ruining his marriage.

"May God have mercy on your soul," Tharpe told Alberto, who listened from a nearby room. Minutes before, the judge had him removed from the courtroom because of his repeated outbursts.

It was the latest in Alberto's long pattern of bizarre courtroom behavior. He insisted, for example, on representing himself for most of his trial, despite his sixth-grade education, lack of legal training and inability to speak English. A jury convicted him of first-degree murder last August, and in November recommended that he face the death penalty.

Alberto, a Mexican national, committed the killings on a Sunday morning in January 1999. After his wife, Carmen Gonzalez, told him she didn't love him anymore, he shot her 11-year-old daughter in the back. Then Alberto, 39, drove to the family restaurant in Apollo Beach, where he shot her 29-year-old daughter and fled toward Mexico. Police arrested him in Texas near the border.

Arguing on Alberto's behalf during the penalty phase of the trial, defense attorney Daniel Hernandez invoked Alberto's childhood near rural Oaxaca, Mexico, where his father beat him with a broomstick and his mentally ill mother had been chained to furniture so she wouldn't wander away from the house.

The defense also suggested Alberto suffered a brain injury in a 1994 car accident. But Alberto did not cooperate after Judge Tharpe ordered him to undergo a PET scan in hopes of finding out.

In sentencing him, Judge Tharpe noted that a doctor had diagnosed Alberto with paranoid personality disorder, but the judge said there was "minimum evidence at best" that he suffered brain damage.

Neither the victims nor the defendant had family members in the courtroom Tuesday.

-- Christopher Goffard can be reached at (813) 226-3337 or goffard@sptimes.com.

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