A judge has sentenced a 36-year-old San Jose man to 25 years-to-life in prison for killing his infant daughter by striking her so hard in the head that her brain shifted in her skull.

A Santa Clara County Superior Court jury earlier this year found Jesse Manuel Figueroa guilty of murder, for fatally striking 8-month-old Baby Raina in 2020 while babysitting her.

He told police he noticed nothing wrong with his daughter before her collapse. But an autopsy showed she had been struck so hard across the face that she had brain damage, and evidence at trial showed the defendant had been physically abusing his two other young children and their mother.

District Attorney Jeff Rosen said that child murders shake the entire community because of the brutality against helpless victims.

“Raina would have been 6-years-old today instead of a name on a murder case,” Rosen said in a statement. “These cases break our hearts, at the brutality, at the senselessness, at the sheer loss of an innocent child. Today, we can only feel some sense of justice that this man will never hurt another child.”

On July 4, 2020, prosecutors said that Figueroa brought the unconscious infant to a Mountain View fire station. The victim was later transported to Stanford’s Lucille Packard Hospital, where doctors spent days trying to save her life before she ultimately succumbed to her injuries.

Figueroa told police he was taking her to a family barbecue when she mysteriously fell unconscious and blood began seeping from her nose. But while at the hospital, a bruise developed on Raina’s left cheek in the distinctive shape and size of an adult hand.

An autopsy showed brain hemorrhages caused by blunt force trauma to her head and ruled her death as a homicide. The medical examiner revealed the blow to Raina "was so hard it caused her brain to dislodge and move to a different part of her head."

Trial evidence showed that Figueroa had repeatedly beaten and strangled his girlfriend, Raina’s mother, and abused their other two children, ages 2 and 3, including by forcing them to kneel on rice. At the time of the murder, he was under a restraining order that prohibited him from having any unsupervised visits with Raina.

The baby’s grandfather wrote in an impact statement: “Raina mattered. Her life mattered. She was not just a name in a case file. She was a baby who was deeply loved and who should still be here today.”