Supreme Court Won't Review Sherman Oaks Stabbing Case

LOS ANGELES, CA — The California Supreme Court refused Wednesday to hear the case of a Sherman Oaks man who was convicted of fatally stabbing his wife.

Aurelio Teran is serving a 29-year-to-life state prison sentence for the Aug. 27, 2017, killing of his 32-year-old wife, Viridiana Gonzalez.

Teran was found guilty last year of first-degree murder, making criminal threats, injuring a spouse and attempting to dissuade a witness from reporting a crime, and jurors found true an allegation that he used a knife in the commission of the murder.

In March, a three-justice panel from California's 2nd District Court of Appeal rejected the defense's contention that instructions given in Teran's trial misled jurors about the applicable test for provocation.

"There was no evidence of provocation," the appellate court panel found in its nine-page ruling. "Rather, the evidence was that Teran had a long history of abusing Gonzalez. On the day of the murder, Teran assaulted Gonzalez multiple times, finally prompting her to seek police protection. After a significant amount of time had passed since last assaulting Gonzalez, Teran broke into the bedroom. When Gonzalez gave him the protective order, he beat and stabbed her."

The woman told the couple's son -- who tried to defend her -- to run from the home, and the boy heard his father angrily yelling at him that he would be back as his dad left their apartment with a knife, according to the appellate court panel's ruling.

Teran fled to Ventura County, where he was arrested the next day after being struck by a car. A Ventura County sheriff's sergeant who responded to a call of a "pedestrian on the roadway" recognized Teran as the suspect being sought in his wife's stabbing death, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.

—City News Service