Pueblo, Colorado – September 15, 2025 – In a courtroom heavy with the weight of unspoken grief and unimaginable betrayal, Jesus Dominguez Sr., a 37-year-old father from Pueblo, stared blankly as a judge handed down a 32-year prison sentence for his role in one of the most grotesque child abuse cases to ever shock the American heartland. For six agonizing years, Dominguez and his girlfriend, Corena Rose Minjarez, had concealed the lifeless bodies of his two young children—3-year-old Yesenia Dominguez and 5-year-old Jesus Dominguez Jr.—as if erasing their existence could absolve the sins that ended it. One tiny form was entombed in concrete within a dingy storage unit; the other, crammed into a battered suitcase in the trunk of an abandoned car rusting away in a scrapyard. The discovery in early 2024 unraveled a web of deception built on drug-fueled neglect, abuse, and cold-blooded cover-up, leaving a community reeling and a family fractured beyond repair.

The sentencing of Dominguez on Friday caps a saga that began in the spring of 2018, a period when the Dominguez household was less a home and more a vortex of chaos. Jesus Dominguez Sr. and Corena Minjarez, then 30 and 31 respectively, were deep in the throes of addiction to methamphetamine and heroin. The couple, scraping by in Pueblo—a working-class city of about 110,000 nestled in southern Colorado’s steel-and-coal shadow—shared custody of Dominguez’s children with their mother, who lived out of state. Yesenia, a bright-eyed toddler with a penchant for twirling in makeshift dresses fashioned from old curtains, and Jesus Jr., her boisterous older brother who dreamed of becoming a firefighter like the ones he’d seen on TV, spent weekends and holidays bouncing between parents. But those visits, meant to be respites of joy, devolved into nightmares of deprivation.

Court documents and trial testimony paint a harrowing picture of the final days. On March 14, 2018—coincidentally Dominguez’s 30th birthday—tragedy struck in the cramped confines of Minjarez’s 2004 Pontiac Grand Am, the family’s makeshift shelter after an eviction from a rental on Sundance Court. Yesenia, punished for a potty-training mishap, had been shoved into a black trash bag and left on the car’s filthy floorboard as Dominguez drove to pick up Minjarez’s own children and Dominguez’s nephew from school. Minjarez rode shotgun, her nerves frayed from withdrawal, while Jesus Jr. fidgeted in the back seat. Upon returning, Minjarez announced the unthinkable: Yesenia wasn’t breathing. Dominguez, in a panic, dropped off the other children at Minjarez’s sister’s apartment and watched as his girlfriend attempted frantic, futile CPR. But fear—of judgment, of the law, of the bite marks and hand injuries Yesenia bore from months of Minjarez’s explosive rages—froze them in inaction. No 911 call. No hospital dash. Instead, they drove to the evicted house, stuffed Yesenia’s small body into a plastic tote, then a suitcase, and wedged it into the Pontiac’s trunk. The odor of decay would soon permeate the car, dismissed by the couple as “just the trash” amid their escalating drug haze.

Weeks later, in April 2018, Jesus Jr.’s turn came. The boy, already regressing from the trauma of his sister’s death and the unstable life in the car, had a similar accident. Minjarez, seething, dragged him to an East Side car wash and blasted him with a high-pressure wand, lacerating his groin and leaving welts that Dominguez later chalked up to “an accident.” Undeterred, the couple pressed on. One afternoon, while Dominguez slipped away to score drugs at an apartment complex near the Colorado State Fairgrounds, Minjarez stayed behind with Jesus Jr. in the Pontiac. When Dominguez returned, Minjarez was hysterical: the boy’s lips were purple, his chest still. Again, no help sought. They bundled his body in trash bags, crammed it into another suitcase, and dumped it in a remote field near the Pueblo Dam, a spot shrouded by scrub brush and forgotten by the world.

What followed was a masterclass in monstrous denial. For six years, Dominguez and Minjarez lived as ghosts themselves, drifting through Pueblo’s underbelly. They continued claiming public assistance benefits for the “missing” children—funds Dominguez pocketed while fabricating stories of the kids living with relatives in Arizona or Phoenix. Family members grew suspicious; holidays passed without photos or updates, school enrollment lapsed, and whispers of the couple’s nomadic, drug-addled existence spread. Yet no one pushed hard enough. “He was applying for benefits and no one could account for the kids,” Pueblo Police Sgt. Frank Ortega later recounted, his voice laced with disbelief. “He was receiving assistance for the kids at the time they were missing.” The suitcases, heavy with horror, were relocated multiple times: Yesenia’s to the storage unit, poured over with concrete bought on Minjarez’s credit card; Jesus Jr.’s to the scrapped Pontiac, towed away in 2023 without a second glance from the junkyard crew.

The veil lifted in January 2024, not through some heroic detective work, but a mundane eviction notice. Relatives of Dominguez and Minjarez, cleaning out the storage unit on the city’s east side, spotted a 55-gallon metal drum sealed with hardened concrete—an oddity amid boxes of forgotten junk. Pueblo police arrived on January 20, pried it open two days later, and confronted the unimaginable: the skeletal remains of a child, wrapped in trash bags, her tiny frame preserved in a tomb of quick-set gray. DNA tests, completed by February 15, confirmed it was Yesenia, last seen alive in the summer of 2018.

The second find came swiftly. Detectives traced the drum’s ownership to Minjarez and zeroed in on her abandoned Pontiac at a local scrapyard. On February 6, hidden in the trunk amid rusted tools and oil cans, was the suitcase containing Jesus Jr.’s remains—equally desiccated, equally damning. Interviews followed on January 31: Dominguez, casual as ever, spun tales of the children thriving in Phoenix. Minjarez, more evasive, offered little. Warrants flew, arrests landed—Minjarez first, then Dominguez, famously nabbed “standing on a sidewalk eating pizza” as officers closed in. By mid-February, the pair faced charges of first-degree murder, abuse of a corpse, and theft of public funds—a litany of felonies that barely captured the depth of their depravity.

The legal odyssey unfolded with prosecutorial pragmatism tinged with moral torment. In July 2025, Dominguez struck a plea deal: guilty to one count of second-degree murder, plus lesser charges of tampering with a deceased body and abuse of a corpse. In exchange, two first-degree murder counts and the theft charge vanished, and he agreed to testify against Minjarez—a move Pueblo District Attorney Kala Beauvais called “an incredibly tough decision” and “necessary move” to secure convictions. “The only two people around the children during their time of death were Jesus Dominguez and Corena Minjarez,” Beauvais explained post-trial. “This created the difficult position… but was something we had to do within legal confines.”

Dominguez’s testimony in August 2025 was a grotesque confessional, detailing the deaths with detached precision: Yesenia’s trash-bag exile, the car-wash scalding, the purple lips, the suitcases sealed against the stench. The jury, unmoved by Minjarez’s defense claim that she acted “out of fear and love” for Dominguez, convicted her on August 27 of two counts of first-degree murder (of victims under 12 by a person in a position of trust) and two counts of abuse of a corpse. Sentencing was immediate and merciless: two consecutive life terms without parole, plus concurrent 120-day stints for corpse abuse. Minjarez, now 39, will die behind bars, her appeals likely as futile as the CPR she feigned years ago.

Dominguez’s Friday sentencing brought a measure of closure, if not catharsis. Judge Larry Nierengarten, peering over the bench at a man who once cradled those children, imposed the stipulated 32 years—no parole eligibility for the first 16—citing the “heinous” nature of the cover-up. “You chose silence over salvation,” the judge intoned, according to courtroom observers. Dominguez, shackled and subdued, offered no apology, only a nod as he was led away to the Colorado Department of Corrections.

The ripple effects extend far beyond the courtroom’s oak panels. For the children’s extended family—grandparents who baked birthday cakes for ghosts, aunts who sent unopened gifts—the verdicts are bittersweet daggers. Yesenia’s grandmother, speaking anonymously to local media, wept: “We mourned them in pieces, never knowing. How do you bury air?” Community vigils in Pueblo’s Rawlings Park, where the kids once played on swings, have swelled with purple ribbons (Yesenia’s favorite color) and toy fire trucks (for Jesus Jr.), symbols of stolen innocence. Child welfare advocates decry the case as a clarion call for reform: Colorado’s underfunded child protective services, already strained, missed red flags like lapsed welfare checks and eviction reports. Nationally, it echoes horrors like the Turpin family’s captivity in California or the Hart Tribe murders in 2018, underscoring how addiction and isolation can fester unchecked.

Sgt. Ortega, who led the investigation, captured the collective revulsion: “This isn’t just a crime; it’s an erasure of souls.” Yet in the quiet aftermath, questions linger. Why didn’t neighbors report the Pontiac’s foul reek? How did benefits flow uninterrupted? And for families like the Domínguezes, what justice heals a void six years wide? As Pueblo steels itself against winter’s chill, the concrete drum and canvas suitcase stand as grim monuments—not to punishment, but to the fragility of trust. In a city forged from iron, the true hardness was in the hearts that let two children vanish without a trace.