SAN JOSE — A judge has upheld child abuse charges in the notorious exorcism death of a 3-year-old girl at a small San Jose church in 2021, paving the way for the victim’s mother and two other close relatives to stand trial, court records show.
The defendants are, respectively, the mother, grandfather and uncle of Arely Naomi Proctor, who died Sept. 24, 2021, at a 25-member Pentecostal church south of downtown San Jose run by Trigueros Hernandez. the following year — as well as a recorded conversation between Claudia Hernandez and her brother in which she reportedly said “that God had taken and everything was going to be OK,” and cautioned about how “it’s going to look like we intended to kill her, but we did not.”, which included bruising all over her body and markings on the child’s neck, numerous burst blood vessels and brain swelling that were all indicative of asphyxiation and being smothered.
Through their questioning of detectives, the defense attorneys also suggested that Arely’s death was the result of a genuine attempt to purge her of a “demon” identified a day earlier by Claudia Hernandez. She reportedly told a police officer that she heard the child screaming and crying and “saying ‘no, no, no’ in her sleep while moving her arms out.”