Trial begins for man accused of abusing, killing girlfriend after he was kicked out of Huntington Beach apartment

Prosecutors making opening statements Monday in the trial of Craig Charron said he beat and manipulated Laura Sardinha before she kicked him out of their Huntington Beach apartment Sept. 2, 2020, but he came back and killed her while she was on a conference call with her mother and best friend.

Attorneys for the defendant did not dispute Charron stabbed his girlfriend to death nearly five years ago. But they say he acted in the heat of passion and in self defense.

The couple began dating in June 2020, and had moved into an apartment on the 8400 block of Jenny Drive by July, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Text exchanges between them suggest he had become physically abusive just weeks later.

“I’m locking myself in a box so you can’t beat me anymore,” Sardinha wrote in a message to Charron dated Aug.15 of that year. “Because I can’t even drive. You blew out my ear drum.”

Charron was heard threatening to “end this relationship” if the victim refused to massage his calves in videos recorded the following day, before she went to a hospital. Medical records that will be presented in court verify she had a perforated ear drum, Senior Deputy Dist. Atty. Janine Madera said.

In footage captured the morning Charron killed Sardinha he is heard repeatedly asking for her permission to have a friend over, noting that the visitor and defendant had been intimately involved.

“You’re trying to f—- with me and be mean,” Sardinha replied. “...I can’t wait to tell her how you beat the s—- out of me.”

By that point, she was done with Charron, according to testimony from her mother and best friend. They were among about a dozen of Sardinha’s loved ones who showed up at the trial Monday and heard detailed accounts about her final moments alive. Some embraced each other while sobbing in the hallway outside of the courtroom between proceedings.

The victim went to her apartment’s leasing office, had Charron evicted at about 11:30 a.m. Relatives said she felt relieved to be rid of him.

“She was happy, and I was happy for her,” the victim’s friend of 21 years, Shaina Smith, recalled of the last conversation she had with Sardinha. “And then things changed very suddenly.”

Charron showed up at the apartment in the middle of that call. Cries of “Please don’t hurt me,” and “No” are heard before Sardinha’s phone falls to the ground, according to transcripts and recordings played Monday.

The victim’s mother, Marie Sardinha, who was still on the line at the time, said her daughter “just kept screaming.”

She and Smith hung up to call police. Laura Sardinha called back and wound up leaving a voice message for Smith, in which she is heard “narrating a portion of her own murder,” Madera said.

First responders found Charron’s girlfriend curled up in a ball on their bathroom floor, Madera said. She had suffered two stab wounds to the chest as well as numerous slashes to her hands and face.

Charron, who is 10 years older than the victim and 10 inches taller, sustained cuts to his left hand as well as lacerations to his chest and throat. He had to be rushed to a hospital for what defense attorney Michael L. Guisti described as “nearly mortal” injuries. he claimed the defendant acted on impulse, and then on instinct as the altercation unfolded in order to defend himself.

“His actions were instinctual, not criminal,” Guisti said. “...It was a mutual struggle with both people inflicting wounds.”

Prosecutors claimed the lacerations to Charron’s throat were self-inflicted. They also accused the defendant of planting one of the three bloody knives found in their apartment near the victim’s body.

Madera also pointed out that Laura Sardinha had difficulty gripping knives or reaching out with her right arm following a motorcycle crash in 2019. However, Guisti noted that the victim worked as a bar back at HQ Gastropub in Huntington Beach, and would have had the ability to hold at least some objects — or a potential weapon — with her hands.

Laura Sardinha was 25 when she died. She was pursuing a psychology degree online with Purdue Global, her mother said.