Son of convicted poisoner admits beating dad

The now-grown son of a Redwood City woman who poisoned her husband with a insecticide-laced milkshake and kidnapped the boy to Mexico for years is facing incarceration himself after accepting a plea deal for attacking his father last year.

Jonathan Fuentes Ortiz, 21, pleaded no contest to felony assault and admitted causing great bodily injury. He faces up to five years in prison when sentenced Nov. 9 and could receive as little as probation. In return for the plea, the District Attorney’s Office dropped another count of assault with a deadly weapon.

"This is a good resolution of the case. This is obviously a young man with a lot of issues to deal with,” said District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe.

According to prosecutors, Ortiz blamed his father for his mother’s imprisonment, leading to assaults on June 25 and Oct. 17, 2010.

Ortiz was just 2 years old in March 1992 when his mother, Elizabeth Fuentes, fed his father a chocolate milkshake mixed with a bug killer and fled the county to her native Mexico. Fuentes was located and arrested in 2000 on attempted murder charges but her son remained missing until his grandmother brought the boy to the San Mateo County women’s jail for a visit. A sharp-eyed deputy connected the child to an age-enhanced drawing commissioned by authorities searching for him and Ortiz was reunited with the father, Gilbert Ortiz, who survived the poisoning. Elizabeth Fuentes was convicted and sentenced to 13 years to life in prison.

Defense attorney Gerritt Rutgers did not return a call for comment but previously told the Daily Journal his client has issues fueled by his mother’s absence and the abrupt switch from living with her mother in Mexico to living with a paternal family he didn’t know.

Father and son were living together in Redwood City with other residents last year when, on two occasions, the younger man beat his father and screamed at him about what he had done to his mother, Wagstaffe said.

The first time, Ortiz put a knife to his father’s chest and later took him to the hospital where the man told doctors he had been robbed at knifepoint, Wagstaffe said.

The second time, the man reportedly told staff he was beaten during a robbery. A family member eventually contacted the detective who investigated the milkshake poisoning in 1992.

Although Ortiz’s father was the alleged victim in the case, prosecutors say he initially tried to protect his son by claiming the injuries were due to other circumstances. However, he was cooperative with prosecutors and ready to testify, Wagstaffe said.

The case "goes to show that when you have violence in the home, it’s what all the studies show, that’s what the child learns,” Wagstaffe said.

Elizabeth Fuentes Ortiz, now 40, claimed self-defense in her 2002 trial on charges of attempted murder, concealing a child, inflicting great bodily injury and torture. Fuentes-Ortiz told the court that by poisoning her husband she meant only to incapacitate, not kill him, to escape an abusive marriage that included sexual abuse. Prosecutors argued, though, that the murder attempt was fueled by jealousy and anger over his long work hours.

On March 11, 2002, Fuentes-Ortiz brought her husband the milkshake laced with Ortho-7 insecticide. She told him it was a protein shake intended to help him build muscle mass. Gilbert Ortiz testified that the drink tasted "like chocolate but sour and burning.”

Ortiz fell to the ground in convulsions, slipped into a 10-day coma and suffered multiple organ failures and a heart attack. While her husband was comatose, Fuentes-Ortiz gave Redwood City police conflicting stories of from where the poison originated — once she said a masked man tried to kill her husband; another time she claimed it was a suicide attempt. By the time Ortiz could tell authorities who had given him the questionable shake, Fuentes-Ortiz was gone. She was profiled numerous times on the television show "Unsolved Mysteries” over the eight years it took FBI agents to arrest her in the Mexican state of Jalisco.

She was denied parole for the first time in January 2010. She is next eligible in 2015.

Michelle Durand can be reached by email: michelle@smdailyjournal.com or by phone: (650) 344-5200 ext. 102.