Judge to decide whether 21-year-old is competent to stand trial for killing 11-year-old girl.

5/2/07 UPDATE: Here, as we promised, is Scott Sandlin's story of the hearing in this morning's Albuquerque Journal.

Robert Jacob Gonzales, 21, is back in court today to determine whether he is competent to stand trial for the rape and killing of 11-year-old Victoria Sandoval in her grandparents' Westgate Heights home on Halloween night 2005.

Gonzales, who is being held on a $4 million cash-only bond charged with first-degree murder, rape, child abuse, aggravated burglary, kidnapping and tampering with evidence, has been at the Las Vegas Medical Center since state District Judge Carl Butkus ruled last summer that he wasn't competent to stand trial.

Now he is back before Butkus again. Reporter Scott Sandlin is there and will bring you a full report in tomorrow's Albuquerque Journal.

Police have said Gonzales climbed through the girl's window and had sex with the girl, then choked her in order to "teach her a lesson" after she told him she was younger than he had thought, according to an earlier Journal report.

Clinical psychologist Eric Westfried testified at the competency hearing before Butkus last June that Gonzales had had "six formal evaluations establishing mental retardation between the ages of 6 and 20" and has difficulty processing information when people are talking, according to earlier reports.

Westfried testified, however, that Gonzales "has at least a general idea of what he is being accused of and what his charges are," the Journal reported last June.

Gonzales was enrolled in the special education program at West Mesa High School from 2000 to 2004 and had been described to police as a "respectful and easygoing" student there who fixed bicycles for needy children, the Journal reported soon after his arrest.

But he admitted to police after his arrest that he had had sex for the first time that night with the girl, calling her his "girlfriend," but then became enraged when 11-year-old told him she was 13, the Journal reported.

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