SALINAS – David Leonardo, who was serving 15 years to life for the 2011 murder of 2-year-old Priscilla Rose Hernandez, was granted parole the Monterey County District Attorney’s Office recently announced.
The California Board of Parole Hearings granted parole to Leonardo after an “en banc” review by a panel of commissioners at a monthly executive board meeting in April.
This was Leonardo’s second parole hearing after Gov. Gavin Newsom overturned his first grant of parole in 2023.
The District Attorney’s Office opposed his release at the “en banc” hearing, arguing that Leonardo did not demonstrate true remorse and engaged in “self-serving deception and impression management.”
On Dec. 3, 2011, Monterey County deputies and firefighters responded to a call of a non-responsive child. Leonardo was upstairs yelling for the first responders to come upstairs. When they entered the bedroom, they found Leonardo holding a 2-year-old girl. She was not wearing a shirt and had several visible bruises on her body including her lower abdomen. Her eyes were open, but her body was pale and motionless and she was unconscious, according to police. Her extremities were cool to the touch, and she had an open airway.
Police learned that Leonardo was the girl’s mother’s boyfriend, who watched the children.
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Following an autopsy, it was learned that the girl had suffered blunt force trauma to her abdomen that caused tears in her abdomen and in her colon which resulted in internal bleeding and led to her death in minutes. Injuries to her mouth indicated that she had been smothered sometime within 24 hours prior to her death. There were numerous bruises on her chest, abdomen, head, legs and arms. There was also severe bruising on her right arm, which appeared to be grab marks.
After the autopsy was complete Leonardo was re-interviewed and police say after a lot of prodding about the injuries and timeline, Leonardo told investigators that he got mad and hit the girl. He said the girl had been throwing a tantrum about her mother leaving and he had given her a time out. Then, he said she urinated and defecated on purpose to get back at him, and he hit her in the stomach. She didn’t speak after that.
At the parole hearing on April 23, the victim’s parent and both grandmothers were present and pleaded with the Board of Parole not to release Leonardo. There were several letters in opposition to the release along with a multi-page petition with signatures from members of the public opposing his parole.
The Board of Parole panel reported that their grant was based on the work Leonardo had done during incarceration to transform and rehabilitate himself. The panel said Leonardo had identified the cause of his triggers and anger through further programming and showed enhanced self-awareness at the hearing. The panel found that he demonstrated remorse and accepted full responsibility for his crime without any minimization. The Board listed his accomplishments in prison including college coursework and determined that he had adequate parole plans. The Board also lauded his participation in many programs offered in prison, according to the District Attorney’s Office.
There were members of the public and family both in favor and opposition of the parole recommendation.
The District Attorney’s Office says that Leonardo will likely be released after serving about 13 years of the sentence.