For six months, she was starved, beaten and burned with a hair dryer. Sometimes she was forced to stay in a box, and others she was hanged by her hands from a hook in a closet.
Ultimately, 4-year-old Genny Rojas was submerged in a bathtub filled with scalding water. She died from her burns.Now, two juries have determined that the little girl's aunt and uncle should die for the murder.
Ivan Gonzales, 31, was sent to death row in January, and on Wednesday, a jury recommended that his 28-year-old wife, Veronica, follow him.
If a judge accepts the verdict, the Chula Vista couple would become the first married couple in California on death row for the same crime.
Testimony during Veronica Gonzales' six-week trial showed that Genny was pushed into water so hot - estimated at 148 degrees - that it peeled the skin from her body. An autopsy found the girl was burned to death over a period of about two hours.
That was on July 21, 1995, six months after Genny was sent to live with the Gonzaleses and their six children. Her mother was in drug rehabilitation and her father was in jail for child molestation.
Veronica Gonzales blamed her husband for the murder and said she suffered from battered women's syndrome.
She testified that she put the little girl in a tub of warm water before going into a closet on orders from her husband to cut lines of crystal methamphetamine. Then she heard the little girl scream.
The couple's then-8-year-old son testified on videotape that he peered through a hole in a door and watched his father push the girl into the steaming water.