Maria Mares is not satisfied with the sentence given to the man who murdered her daughter.
"I'm never going to be OK. I cry every day," she said.
Mares is often tearful when she talks about the prison sentence given to Freddy Tellez, the 18-year-old Hailey man who murdered her daughter, 16-year-old Margarita Guardado, almost a year ago.
"I hate him so much," Mares said. "I don't want to forgive him. I can't right now."
Tellez was sentenced last Thursday to 24 years to life in prison by 5th District Court Judge Robert J. Elgee.
Mares doesn't think that's enough.
"I think he deserves the death penalty," she said. "I know 24 years will go fast, and someday he'll be out."
Margarita Guardado, affectionately known as Maggie, was a beautiful 16-year-old Wood River High School student, whose life was brutally ended in the early morning hours of Aug. 17, 2007, when Tellez, her former boyfriend, hit her in the head with a hammer, not once, but four times. He then poured a flammable liquid on her body and lit it on fire on the street in front of her mother's home on Mountain Ash Drive in southeast Hailey.
Mares could only recognize her daughter's body later that day by a ring on her finger.
Mares is a 17-year Wood River Valley resident, a single mother who cleans offices at Hailey City Hall and is a good friend of many of the people who work there. She has five other children, two sons, older than Margarita, and three daughters who were younger. The three younger children, ages 16, 8 and 4, still live at home.
The death of her daughter, though it happened more than a year ago, has devastated the family.
"I'm not pleased with the results," Mares said. "After everything that happened to my daughter, I was expecting that he would spend the rest of his life in prison."
Mares said Tellez and her daughter had dated for about a year prior to the murder. She said they broke up about three weeks before that, and both were seeing other people.
She said Margarita became the girlfriend of Ricardo Tellez-Vargas, a Hailey man who was 26 at the time of her murder.
Mares was pleased with her daughter's relationship with Tellez-Vargas, who is apparently not related to Freddy Tellez, despite the common surname. She thought it a great improvement over Margarita's relationship with Tellez, who Blaine County prosecutors described at sentencing as a vicious man who often resorted to violence in confrontations or disputes.
The family of Tellez-Vargas is friends with the Mares family. They were vacationing together at Redfish Lake about a week before Margarita's death.
Margarita was traveling back to Hailey with Tellez-Vargas on Aug. 11, 2007 when they were involved in a traffic accident on the north side of Galena Summit. She suffered a broken collarbone and was flown by emergency helicopter to Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center in Boise. She was released from the hospital on Aug. 16.
For reasons unknown to her mother, or to investigators for that matter, she called Tellez at about 1:30 a.m. on Aug 17. Tellez was at his home, several blocks away. He drove to the Mares home and met with Margarita in the street. During the conversation he became upset, grabbed a carpenter's hammer from the backseat of his car and hit her in the head four times.
"He never said why," Mares said. "All I know is he killed her, and left her there to die alone.
"I have a question for the judge and Mr. Werth," Mares said, referring to Hailey attorney Douglas Werth, who represented Tellez under his public defender contract with Blaine County.
"I'd like to know if they'd feel the same way if it was someone from their family. If it was someone from their family, would they want him out on the streets some day? Because, you know, with his temper, I don't think anybody wants him out but them and his family.
"I don't feel any good knowing he's going to come out some day and get on with his life, and we suffer every day with the loss of our Maggie.
"I was hoping he would pay the rest of his life in there, but I guess my hope was too high."
Confessed murderer Freddy Tellez stands for sentencing last Thursday in Blaine County 5th District Court. In the background is the image of murder victim Margarita Guardado, which was projected throughout the hearing. Tellez was sentenced to 24 years to life.
Photo by David N. Seelig
