SAN JOSE — A judge has upheld child abuse charges in the notorious exorcism death of a 3-year-old girl at a small San Jose church in 2021, paving the way for the victim’s mother and two other close relatives to stand trial, court records show.

Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Hanley Chew issued a ruling May 13 in which Claudia Hernandez, Rene Trigueros Hernandez and Rene Aaron Hernandez Santos were held to answer — the procedural term for declaring sufficient trial evidence — on criminal charges filed against them two years ago.

The defendants are, respectively, the mother, grandfather and uncle of Arely Naomi Proctor, who died Sept. 24, 2021, at a 25-member Pentecostal church south of downtown San Jose run by Trigueros Hernandez.

They were each re-arraigned Monday on one felony count of child abuse resulting in death, and they pleaded not guilty. Their next court hearing is scheduled for Aug. 14; all three are being held in Santa Clara County jail custody, without bail, after Chew denied a defense motion for pretrial release.

If convicted, the defendants face up to 25 years to life in prison. Chew’s holding order was based on a weeklong preliminary examination that concluded March 25, during which only prosecution witnesses testified before the judge.

San Jose police detectives testified about interviews with the defendants after Arely died — but before they were arrested several months apart the following year. The testimony also touched on a recorded conversation between Claudia Hernandez and her brother in which she reportedly said “that God had taken (Arely) and everything was going to be OK,” and cautioned about how “it’s going to look like we intended to kill her, but we did not.”

Michelle Jorden, the county’s chief medical examiner who performed Arely’s autopsy, also testified, detailing the multitude of injuries the child suffered before she died. They included bruising all over her body and markings on the child’s neck, numerous burst blood vessels and brain swelling that were all indicative of asphyxiation and being smothered.

Defense attorneys questioned whether Arely’s death was a homicide, and challenged what they characterized as police detectives’ skepticism of the defendants’ Pentecostal faith, arguing that it prejudiced them against considering non-criminal scenarios.

They also sought to establish there was no intent to kill when Hernandez, Trigueros Hernandez and Hernandez Santos took part in the exorcism, a ritual with which the grandfather claimed past experience in his native El Salvador. Before his arrest, Trigueros Hernandez admitted to this news organization to performing the exorcism.

Through their questioning of detectives, the defense attorneys also suggested that Arely’s death was the result of a genuine, if misguided, attempt to purge her of a “demon” identified a day earlier by Claudia Hernandez. She reportedly told a police officer that she heard the child screaming and crying and “saying ‘no, no, no’ in her sleep while moving her arms out.”

Deputy District Attorney Rebekah Wise summarized the severity of the acts that ended in Arely’s death, in separate briefs urging the judge to uphold the charges and later to oppose pretrial release for the defendants. She also contended that to this point, the defendants have not shown remorse for their actions.

“During this assault, Arely Doe fought for her life as three trusted adults forcibly grabbed her by her neck, torso, back, and legs, smothered her by repeatedly attempting to pry open her mouth to make her vomit, and held her with so much force that she had internal bleeding and injuries,” wrote in the earlier filing. “The evidence shows that while this assault was ongoing, Arely struggled to escape from her abusers. She clamped her mouth in resistance to the adults who were trying to pry it open.”

Arely’s death did not draw wide attention until nearly eight months after it occurred, becoming public only after police investigating an unrelated kidnapping searched the church attended by two suspects who later pleaded no contest in that case.

(Staff writer Caelyn Pender contributed to this report.)