Giselle Esteban, the suspect in the murder of nursing student Michelle Le, will begin her trial on Sept. 17, exactly one year after Le’s body was found in a remote area near Sunol and Pleasanton, according to media reports.
According to the Hayward Daily Review, Esteban, 28, of Union City, appeared in an Oakland courthouse Friday morning with court-appointed attorney Andrea Auer, who also set a March 5 court date to suppress some evidence and challenge the makeup of the grand jury that indicted her client.
Esteban was indicted by a grand jury in December in order to speed-up the court proceedings.
Esteban was arrested Sept. 7, almost four months after Le, 26, of San Mateo, disappeared on May 27 from the Hayward Kaiser where Le was completing a clinical rotation.
She pleaded not guilty to the murder charge on Jan. 20.
Transcripts from the December grand jury hearing revealed that prosecutors believed Esteban stalked Le and blamed Le for her broken relationship with Scott Marasigan, the father of her daughter.
While Marasigan said he had briefly dated Le, he said he developed a more intimate relationship with Esteban, according to reports.
Here are some details from those transcripts:
- Prosecutors said Esteban did not want Marasigan to have “any sort of contact at all” with Le and would threaten him and state consequences that could happen if he continued to see Le.
- Text messages sent from Esteban to Marasigan (as reported by The Hayward Daily Review) were as follows:
- Feb. 18: “If you aren’t sorry for anything you have done with that whore and not willing to make things right for [our daughter’s] sake, then no, I’m not sorry for the consequences your actions have brought you both. You dug your own graves.”
- Feb. 25: “FYI, you pushed me into insanity with you putting whores before your own family. You should have loved [our daughter] and I more, but you loved sex and attention more. Those two are exactly what you are going to get now. You reap what you sow.”
- March 2: “And Michelle has dug her own grave by being a homewrecker and a whore. She won’t be an issue for much longer.”
- May 29: “Where’s Michelle?” [Read all of the texts here]
- A prosecutor said circumstantial evidence like Le’s blood and hair indicate that Esteban assaulted Le in Kaiser Hayward’s parking lot then placed her in Le’s car where Le continued to bleed.
- Marasigan described his relationship with Esteban as volatile and "was very manipulative and kind of used that as a power play."
- Marasigan filed a temporary restraining order against Esteban a few days before Le’s disappearance and that Esteban "was exhibiting unstable behavior" in those days leading up to Le going missing.
Esteban is being held at Santa Rita Jail without bail. She is said to have given birth to a second child in November while she was in custody, but the child's father's name has not been disclosed.
