Stepmother found guilty of injury to child after 4-year-old boy dies of starvation

SAN ANTONIO - A local woman faces life in prison after a Bexar County jury convicted her of starving her 4-year-old stepson to death.

It took the jury about an hour to convict Miranda Casarez, 25, of injury to a child causing serious bodily harm by omission for the 2021 death of Benjamin "Benji" Cervera.

She was charged alongside the child's father, Brandon Cervera, who is still awaiting trial.

In August of 2021, a nurse at Children's Hospital of San Antonio called police to the emergency room after the child was found to be extremely underweight with multiple bruises.

During the trial, jurors watched videos of the boy from the days leading up to his death, recorded by Casarez, showing him crying and shaking uncontrollably and begging for bread and water.

After the guilty verdict, Casarez took the stand during the punishment phase to ask for mercy, agreeing that she should have done more to help Benji.

"My plan was to leave with them," she said referring to the children she was raising with Benji's father. "But of course they were not my biological kids, so then it would have been kidnapping. If I would have known it would have led to this, I would have took off with them."

She said she recorded the videos of Benji crying to get the attention of the boy's father in hopes that he'd get them help.

On the stand, she showed the jury the tattoo she got on her left arm in honor of Benji and described how she wanted to kill herself after he died. "I lost everything," she said. "(I felt) like any parent would feel when they lost their kid."

"You understand that this jury thinks you starved (Benji) to death," her attorney Anthony Cantrell asked Casarez in front of the jury. "Can you look this jury in the eyes and tell them you will never ever put yourself in a situation where you're going to harm a child or be accused of that?"

"I would never do that," she responded. "I will never harm a child."

She's asking for probation.

Cantrell described Casarez as a "decent quiet person" who loves children and loved Benji. Casarez told the jury she grew up in Pleasanton and attended school through the 11th grade before dropping out at the urging of her 21-year-old boyfriend, whom she described as physically violent and verbally abusive. She had her first son with this man but eventually left him after three and a half years, Casarez explained.

She moved in with her mom, started working at IHOP and met Brandon Cervera a few months later. They talked on social for about a week before she and her son moved in with him and his two sons, one of whom was Benji. A couple months later, she became pregnant with a girl, their first child together. However, she claims Brandon offered no help whatsoever in raising the children. She took care of all the cooking, cleaning and diaper changing. When they moved to an apartment in Northeast San Antonio in March of 2021, Benji's behavior started changing, she said. He started throwing tantrums, and Brandon would discipline the boy with a belt. By August of 2021, Benji would be dead. Casarez discovered him not breathing after she woke from a nap on Aug. 17.

"I was in shock, I just got frozen," she told the jury, who listened to the 911 calls of Casarez describing Benji's shallow breathing and faint heartbeat to the dispatcher as she drove him in her car to go get help.

Cantrell asked her if she know Benji had been starving, to which she replied she didn't. Was she giving him water and nutrition and feeding him, he asked. Yes she was, she said.

Prosecutors will have the chance to cross-examine her when the punishment phase resumes Thursday morning.

This verdict comes after her attorneys attempted to dispute the child's cause of death, which had been determined by the medical examiner to be starvation-related.

Prosecutors used text message evidence gathered from conversations between Casarez and her mother, in which Miranda allegedly discussed denying the 4-year-old food.