Inset: Cassandra Brazeal (Grant County Sheriff”s Office). Background: The area near where Brazeal set a doubly fatal house fire in Santa Clara, N.M. (Google Maps).
A New Mexico woman will spend just shy of four decades behind bars for intentionally setting a house fire that killed two women.
Cassandra Brazeal, 36, pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder and one count of aggravated arson over the deaths of 78-year-old Mary Lou Maynes and 60-year-old Sara Louise Maes.
On Thursday, she was sentenced to 15 years for each murder count and nine years for the arson count. Grant County District Court Judge James Foy ordered the sentences to run consecutively, or one after another, for a total of 39 years in prison, the 6th Judicial District Attorney’s Office announced in a press release. The defendant must serve at least 85% of her sentence before she is eligible for parole.
The underlying incident occurred on Nov. 28, 2023, at a house on West Lincoln Street in Santa Clara, a tiny village and bedroom community located some 9 miles east of Silver City.
A 911 call was placed about a house fire, but by the time fire crews from Santa Clara, Hurley, Fort Bayard and Whiskey Creek arrived, the structure was already engulfed in flames, hindering rescue efforts.
After the inferno was extinguished, crews found Maynes, who had relied on supplemental oxygen, and Maes, dead inside, prosecutors said.
But it was the defendant who sealed her own fate.
In December 2023, Brazeal was arrested by the Grant County Sheriff’s Office and detained on an outstanding arrest warrant for harassment in another county, according to prosecutors.
That earlier case was related to threats allegedly made about burning down another woman’s house and street in Albuquerque, some 240 miles north of Santa Clara, according to the Silver City Daily Press.
“While in the Grant County Detention Center, Brazeal was speaking on the phone with an unknown caller, when she was overheard by a detention officer stating, ‘I didn’t mean to kill them’ and ‘They must have spread the fire after I lit it,'” prosecutors said.
The defendant was subsequently charged with two counts of first-degree murder and one count of aggravated arson. Under the terms of her plea deal, both homicide counts were downgraded.
In an early motion for pretrial detention, Grant County Deputy District Attorney Tomas Medina alleged Brazeal not only set fire to the victims’ residence, but also sent text messages threatening to burn down the house of her boyfriend, who is a relative of the women.
During her sentencing hearing, Judge Foy repeatedly said the crimes committed by the defendant were “heinous.”
The court granted Brazeal two years, six months, and 26 days of credit against her sentence for time served in pretrial detention.
