Teresa Ortiz/News 13

(Published Saturday, May 16, 2013)

The family of a woman found dead in the back seat of her car in an Irvine park has not been told why she was pulled from her vehicle.

Police on Saturday had not released information about a possible motive in the death of 32 year-old Christine Martinez after she went missing Saturday morning.

However, family members say they still will not know the truth for a short while as police continue to work on the case.

“She’s my sister, she was just in town for a weekend and she took a plane and left and never came back no matter what she said,” said Ramirez-Ruiz, who lost her sister to cancer in 2011. “We’re waiting. We’re waiting. Who knows? It’s not going to stay this way for very much time. And I’m not going to get comfortable until they tell us why it happened.”

Police said Martinez was killed by her husband, James Garcia, who is a Mexican national.

They said he was driving his 2007 Chevy Tahoe with a broken windshield, after leaving a party at a home at 725 W 5th Street.

James Garcia was arrested at the scene of the crime with his wife.

He is being held at the Irvine Regional Justice Center on murder charges.

The couple have been married for a week and police said the couple did not get along, according to neighbors.

Friends said Ramirez-Ruiz said she was planning to move to California, the same state where her sister became ill, after the death of her sister.

Police searched the park, looking in the back area of the home and in the neighborhood. Authorities said they collected evidence from the scene at the time of the crime.

A family member told News 13 his sister, who is the mother of two young sons, would have a funeral Monday and was gone for such a long time.

Martinez was last seen at 7:48 a.m. Saturday in the parking lot of The Shops at Sunrise, a popular shopping center in the area.

Her body was found in the back of the car parked on the grass outside the shopping center at 8:45 a.m. Sunday by a passerby. Police said they believe she was in the vehicle when Garcia pulled her car over.

Martinez was last seen wearing a red