Driver sentenced for Bay Terraces DUI hit-and-run that killed sisters on Mother's Day

The man who killed two sisters in a DUI hit-and-run in Bay Terraces in May 2023 was sentenced to 14 years and eight months in prison on Monday.

Tony Garcia was sentenced for the deaths of Jazmin Higuera Cano, 23, and Elizabeth Higuera Cano, 25, after pleading guilty to vehicular manslaughter and driving under the influence in July.

The crash happened in the early morning hours of May 14, 2023, which was Mother’s Day.

Elizabeth Higuera Cano had just learned she was pregnant with her third child, her family said, and went out to celebrate with her sister and their friends.

They were on Munda Road, just a few blocks from Elizabeth Higuera Cano’s home, when Garcia crashed his truck into their car, leaving the two sisters dead and the driver and another passenger seriously injured.

“Do you even care that you took a mother from her little girls? She won’t ever get to see them grow up. Or that you took two daughters away from a mom?” Danna Moreno asked of Garcia at Monday’s sentencing.

Moreno was driving the car Garcia hit and said Monday she still had a collapsed lung and serious spinal injuries.

“Having to look at these scars every single day when I look at myself in the mirror, it’s a constant reminder of the night you killed my friends and seriously injured me, all because you chose to get behind the wheel,” Moreno said.

Garcia chose not to speak in court Monday. He had been kicked out of a casino that night, the judge noted, and then ran away from the crash. Authorities said he turned himself in hours later.

“It tells me something about your character that after you saw a mangled car and people that were definitely in there struggling with their lives, you could say to another human being, ‘This is a hit-and-run,’ and run away like a coward,” San Diego County Judge Polly Shamoon said.

After the crash, Elizabeth Higuera Cano’s husband Daniel Jimenez said he had to move their two daughters to Florida where his parents help care for them as he remains on active duty with the Navy.

“My whole life changed. My whole daughters’ lives changed. It shattered everything in my life,” Jimenez said.

Jimenez said his children, 7-year-old Rosalyn and 4-year-old Amayah, are beautiful like their mother and inherited her love of art. He said the hardest part of the past year has been seeing the girls’ pain, as he tries his best to keep his wife’s memory alive.

“I think what hurts the most is just watching my children suffer. Hearing them talk about their mom, or my daughter was explaining to me how hurt she was on this Mother’s Day at school, because everyone else’s mom came in to get gifts and she doesn’t have a mommy anymore,” Jimenez said. “That’s honestly the hardest thing.”

“We were happy. We had hope in our lives, we were working on our future, we had another baby we were happily expecting now, and I think what I really want people to remember is just how your decisions could affect other people’s lives,” he continued.

“My children’s life was forever altered. My life was changed entirely upside down,” Jimenez said. “And it had nothing to do with any of us. It was just because of a stranger’s bad decisions.”

Garcia was also ordered to pay more than $75,000 in fees and restitution to the victims. He was given credit for 517 days served.