An El Monte man whom authorities said was linked by DNA to a 67-year-old woman's killing at an assisted living center in Covina nearly three decades ago pleaded guilty Monday to first-degree murder.
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Ronald S. Coen immediately sentenced David Adolph Bernal to 25 years to life in state prison for the Jan. 19, 1996, strangulation of Mary Lindgren .
"Do you admit that you personally murdered the victim in this matter?" the judge asked the defendant.
"Yes," the 50-year-old man responded.
The victim's three children objected to the dismissal of special circumstance allegations of murder during the commission of a rape, sodomy and burglary as a result of the plea agreement.
"We want the court to know -- and the case record to reflect -- our distress that the special circumstance allegations originally filed in her murder case have been dropped, and for what we believe are purely political reasons to appease the current district attorney," the victim's daughter, Kristina Lindgren, said, reading from a statement on behalf of herself and her two siblings, Carol Leonard and Don Lindgren. "If ever a homicide warranted a finding of special aggravating circumstances to keep our mother's killer behind bars for life, this is surely one."
"It has been an excruciating 28 years and four months almost to the day since our mother's body was found -- disfigured and savagely beaten in her room at an assisted living home in Covina," the family said in its statement. "Since then, not a day has passed that we are not overcome with anguish, thinking of the pain and terror she endured in her last moments on this earth, unable even to scream for help."
" This predator hunted for a victim in the assisted living facility, knowing its residents were unlikely to fight back," the family wrote in its statement. "Our mother's room was in the far corner of the Covina Villa building, adjacent to a parking lot where the killer wouldn't be spotted from the street as he entered through a sliding glass door in the early morning darkness on January 19, 1996."
The victim's children -- who called their mother a "frail, defenseless stroke survivor" -- noted that authorities were eventually able to analyze semen left by their mother's killer and trace it to a potential relative in the state's prison database. A saliva sample from the defendant wound up being a DNA match when he was taken into custody in August 2020, according to the family's statement.
Defense attorney Ruchi Gupta told the judge that Bernal was 22 at the time of the crime and was diagnosed soon afterward as schizophrenic and had remained with his mother in Los Angeles County, where he was undergoing mental health treatment.
Investigators had conducted extensive interviews with the facility's staff members, residents and their families, outside vendors, contractors, delivery personnel and neighbors living near the center -- all of whom were excluded as potential suspects, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department said shortly after Bernal's August 2020 arrest.
Several items of evidence, including DNA, were also collected and held for forensic analysis. The suspect's DNA profile was developed, but it did not match any profiles within the state or federal criminal justice DNA databases, according to the sheriff's department.
Homicide investigators assigned to the sheriff's Unsolved Unit subsequently collaborated with the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office in 2019 to submit the unidentified DNA profile to the California Department of Justice, which notified investigators of their results.
Homicide investigators, along with sheriff's crime lab personnel, subsequently identified Bernal, whose "DNA was a match collected (with DNA) from the body of Mary Lindgren," according to the sheriff's department.
Bernal was charged in August 2020 with Lindgren's killing and subsequently indicted in January 2023.
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