Tracy Press
April 11, 2009
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 Melissa Huckaby / San Joaquin County Jail booking mug |
Twenty-eight-year-old Melissa Chantel Huckaby was arrested at 11:55 p.m. Friday on suspicion of kidnapping and killing 8-year-old Sandra Cantu.
Huckaby was arrested at the Tracy Police Department, where she had gone voluntarily for questioning nearly five hours earlier, police spokesman Sgt. Tony Sheneman said.
She was booked into custody at 2:49 a.m. Saturday at San Joaquin County Jail, in French Camp.No bail is allowed, and Huckaby’s arraignment will be at 1:30 p.m. Tuesday.
Huckaby, a West High School graduate, lives with her grandparents, Clifford Lane Lawless and Connie Lawless, in the Orchard Estates Mobile Home Park, where Sandra lived.
No other arrests were made, and Sheneman offered no other details but said he would have a press conference at 10 a.m. today.
Huckaby told a Tracy Press reporter in an exclusive interview Friday that she teaches Sunday school at Clover Road Baptist Church, her grandfather’s church just down the street from the mobile home park.
She said someone took her large, black suitcase that she’d left in her driveway on March 27, the same afternoon that Sandra went missing.
Police found Sandra’s dead body in a black suitcase submerged in a dairy lagoon 2 miles north of the mobile home park.
Earlier Friday evening, FBI agents and police were seen at the Baptist church, where they loaded what looked like a fold-up bed into a crime scene van. They had searched the church on Monday.
Huckaby told the Tracy Press that she and her 5-year-old daughter had lived for the past year with her grandparents and that on March 27 Sandra had stopped by her house and asked to play with her daughter. Huckaby said she’d said no, because her daughter needed to pick up her toys and that Sandra went to another friend’s home.
Huckaby’s dark purple Kia SUV was towed and searched by police Tuesday night.
When she talked to the Tracy Press Friday, she said she wasn’t the same Melissa Huckaby who pleaded no contest Jan. 9 to a felony charge of second-degree commercial burglary and a misdemeanor charge of petty theft after being arrested in November 2008 for trying to steal something from Target. She had been examined by doctors and was deemed mentally competent to stand trial. She was due back in court next week for sentencing.
The criminal complaint also shows she was locked up in Los Angeles County for conviction of property theft in 2006.
Huckaby was released Thursday from Sutter Tracy Community Hospital, where she spent several days in the intensive care unit for what she described as “internal bleeding.” Police were stationed at the hospital during her stay.
Police announced Friday a $32,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the killer of Sandra Cantu, last seen in a surveillance video skipping down the street near her mobile home.
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