Drifter's Crimes of Infanticide Were 'Pure Evil'

A California drifter has been convicted of killing five of his own infants over the course of a decade, according to reports. A Yolo County jury on Tuesday found 63-year-old Paul Allen Perez guilty of one count of first-degree murder, three counts of second-degree murder, and one count of assault on a child under 8 with force likely to produce great bodily injury resulting in death, for killings that stretched from 1992 to 2001 across California, per the Sacramento Bee. Prosecutors, who called the crimes "pure evil," said all five victims were his children, each under 6 months old. Perez, already in prison on unrelated charges when he was hit with five murder counts in 2020, faces life without parole at his April sentencing.

Remains of just two of the five infants have been found. The first was discovered in 2007 when a bowfisher's arrow became lodged in a submerged cooler in a canal near Sacramento. Inside was the body of a baby boy, about a month old, wrapped in a Winnie the Pooh blanket, along with heavy objects apparently meant to sink the container, per SFGate. For 12 years, the child was unidentified—until a 2019 DNA match finally named him as Nikko Lee Perez, born in Fresno in 1996. That led detectives to uncover four more dead siblings: Kato Allen, born in 1992; Mika Alena, born in 1995; another Nikko Lee, born in 1997; and Kato Krow, born in 2001, per the Bee. All children were born to the same mother, Yolanda Perez, in Fresno or Merced.

At trial, Yolanda Perez testified that she endured years of beatings, rape, and threats from Paul Perez, and that he warned he would kill her or their only surviving child, Brittany, if she went to police. She said the first killing happened in 1992, when she heard him striking their infant son. Yolanda earlier pleaded guilty to five counts of child endangerment and faces up to 10 years in prison. Yolo County Sheriff Tom Lopez called it the most disturbing case he had seen in four decades in law enforcement, noting, "There can be no victim more vulnerable and innocent than an infant."