On the day she changed her locks to keep him out, 25-year-old Laura Sardinha was on a call with her mother and her best friend, sounding relieved to be done with boyfriend Craig J. Charron.
She had taken out a restraining order against him, the latest of several women to do so. She had demanded that he move out of her Huntington Beach apartment. She would not answer his calls.
On the afternoon of Sept. 2, 2020, however, her phone call was interrupted when he appeared inside her apartment. She left a chilling 37-second voicemail message as he attacked her with multiple knives.
“If you listen to it carefully, you hear a woman narrating her own murder,” Orange County Deputy Dist. Atty. Janine Madera told jurors during her closing argument at Charron’s trial in Santa Ana this week.
After less than a day of deliberations, jurors on Tuesday found Charron, 39, guilty of first-degree murder.
Sardinha had worked as a bartender’s assistant, but a motorcycle accident in 2019 left her unable to grab a knife well enough to chop lemons, as the job required. She was pursuing an online psychology degree, and had been dating Charron, an Air Force veteran, for just a few months.
Sardinha had received a $750,000 settlement after her accident, and gave him nearly $100,000 of it, according to testimony. “Thank you for showing me that you are all mine,” he texted her after receiving a sizable chunk.
Two weeks before her murder, Sardinha texted him to say that she could not hear, because he had busted her ear drum. In an exchange she recorded on her phone, she can be heard saying, “You keep hitting me.”
“Massage my calves or end this relationship,” he replied.
On the morning of the day she was killed, Sardinha told a friend that Charron woke her up with a demand for oral sex. She recorded herself begging him to leave her alone and let her sleep.
“Can you please leave?” she asked repeatedly. “Please get away from me.”
“All I want is to be with you,” he said.
“You terrify me, because you don’t leave.”
Later, filming himself in the apartment, he can be heard saying, “Oh my God, don’t hit me…Laura, why are you hitting me?” while she sits on the couch yards away, trying to ignore him.
Just before noon, she went to the leasing office to ask if her locks could be changed. The apartment manager saw Charron approaching and let her hide inside, then walked her back to her apartment. A maintenance man changed her locks.
Charron texted and called, but she ignored him. Around 1:15 p.m., she was on a three-way call with her mom and her best friend when they heard her cry, “Oh my God, he’s here.”
It is not clear how Charron got inside her apartment. By his account, he simply walked through the unlocked door.
After her friend hung up to call 911, Sardinha called her back and left a voicemail message in which she can be heard screaming, “He’s gonna kill me!” and “Get away from me!”
The prosecutor said Charron stabbed Sardinha twice in the chest, nearly sliced her nose off, and stabbed her in the head so hard it bent a pronged tomato knife he was using.
Police arrived soon after to find Sardinha dead, and Charron bleeding from wounds to his chest and neck. The prosecutor suggested he had inflicted them himself with a serrated steak knife to bolster his story that Sardinha had attacked him.
“It doesn’t matter if he self-inflicted wounds or if she defended herself,” Madera said. “He was the aggressor 100% of the time.”
At about 6 feet tall and 220 pounds, he was some 9 inches taller than Sardinha and more than 100 pounds heavier.
“She can’t cut lemons and limes reliably with a knife, let alone defend her life,” Madera said. “He towered over her.”
Taking the stand in his own defense, Charron described himself as a former combat medic with a 100% disability rating who received psychiatric treatment at the VA. He said he could not recall much of the confrontation with Sardinha, calling it “hazy.” But he insisted she had come at him with a knife and that he stabbed her in self-defense.
“I didn’t quite comprehend what was happening in the moment,” he said. “It’s taking me a second to understand I’m being cut up.”
During the trial, three of Charron’s ex-girlfriends testified that they had taken out restraining orders against him. One woman said he choked her and hit her in the head with a wine bottle. Another said he slapped her and poured vodka on her head. A third said he pinned her to a wall and punched a man who was in her company.
“He has a problem with control,” Madera told jurors. “He doesn’t care for women who want to exercise free will.”
In his closing argument, defense attorney Michael Guisti said that while his client had a history of violence, it was “non-murderous violence,” and argued the evidence suggested he might have acted in the heat of passion or in self-defense.
He said Charron’s wounds had been serious enough that he was “basically dead” and had to be revived. “They need you to believe he faked his wounds,” Guisti said.
Madera described Sardinha’s death as “cold-hearted murder” and pointed to the voicemail she left in her last moments.
“You don’t hear the defendant on it, and his silence is absolutely deafening,” she said. “He’s enjoying taking his time killing her.”
Superior Court Judge Michael Cassidy set a sentencing date of July 25. Charron faces the possibility of life in prison.
