Mother disappointed in manslaughter verdict for daughter's killer
PUEBLO • Ashley Lindenberger sat in her living room recently, watching her infant daughter Jenna while a courtroom drama played on the television.
On the screen, an actor playing a juror intones, “On the charge of first-degree murder, we find the defendant not guilty, your honor.”
The show was oddly similar to the real-life drama that Lindenberger sat through earlier this month: the trial of Jules Lynn Cuneo, a former foster mom accused of killing Lindenberger’s 2-year-old daughter, Alizé.
In that case, the jury found Cuneo guilty of child abuse resulting in the girl’s death but spared her on a first-degree murder charge.
Lindenberger said she was disappointed by the verdict. She would have preferred to see Cuneo forced to spend the rest of her life in prison, rather than the 16- to 48-year sentence that the child abuse conviction will bring.
“I want her to suffer for what she put my daughter through,” Lindenberger said of Cuneo, who was convicted of inflicting the closed head injury that cost Alizé her life in October 2007.
Lindenberger, 23, attended nearly every day of the trial.
“I wanted to hear what really went on, because I was in prison at the time,” she said, referring to her own conviction on drug charges.
El Paso County Human Services had taken custody of Alizé and her younger brother Anthoni. Both their parents wound up in jail.
“I wanted to get to the bottom of it, to understand what happened,” she said.
Lindenberger is convinced that the jurors would have returned a guilty verdict on first-degree murder if they had heard the tapes made by Cuneo’s neighbor via a baby monitor.
The tapes allegedly showed Cuneo being verbally abusive to Alizé. That testimony was excluded from the criminal trial but could have figured in a wrongful-death civil lawsuit that Lindenberger filed against El Paso County officials.
She declined to discuss the civil lawsuits.
But given what the jurors did hear, Lindenberger said, she understands why they limited the verdict to child abuse plus reckless manslaughter.
“I understand it, but I wanted it to be different, because I didn’t want her to get out of prison,” she said. “My daughter is worth more than that.”
