A charismatic preacher, his son and his daughter are accused of killing a three year-old girl, the preacher's granddaughter, through a ritual that was described at the time as an exorcism. They were all in court Monday for a preliminary hearing.

Rene Huezo, aka Rene Trigueros Hernandez, was arrested in May 2022 for the September 24, 2021 killing of three-year-old Arely Naomi Proctor. Huezo was the leader of a backroom or backyard Pentacostal church behind a home on 2nd Street in San Jose called Iglesia Evangelica Apostoles y Profetas, and the girl died there allegedly after being brought to her grandfather by her mother and uncle, Claudia Hernandez and Rene Hernandez Santos.

According to early reports from investigators in the case, the mother was concerned that her daughter was possessed because she woke up from sleeping multiple times one night, screaming and crying periodically.

After bringing her to the grandfather's church, investigators say, the trio allegedly tried to force her to vomit up the demons inside her by gagging, squeezing, and choking her. Within 12 hours, the girl was dead of asphyxiation and/or strangulation.

Following the girl's death, Claudia Hernandez posted a bizarrely nonchalant video on YouTube where she discusses it, saying, "I could sit here and be negative and say ‘I wish I could go back.’ But there’s no point of me doing that. Because I cannot change what is. It is what it is."

On Monday, all three family members appeared in court for a probable cause hearing in which prosecutors laid out the evidence against each of the three defendants. As Bay Area News Group reports, Judge Hanley Chew will decide if there is enough evidence to go to trial after this hearing ends next week.

San Jose Police Department Lt. J.J. Vallejo, the lead investigator in the case, gave hours of testimony Monday about his initial interviews with the subjects. He said that Huezo and Hernandez essentially admitted to causing the girl's death after forcing her to vomit and holding her tightly for hours.

The girl was also reportedly starved of food and water for almost 24 hours before her death.

He said that the family believed the girl might have become possessed after seeing something "sinister" on her mother's cellphone.

As NBC Bay Area reports, Huezo has since denied that the ritual was an exorcism, but said that the girl was acting like the girl from the movie, The Exorcist.

Vallejo recounted a story that Huezo told him about an earlier exorcism he had participated in back in El Salvador, as Bay Area News Group reports. In that ritual, Huezo said he was part of a 12-man crew who held a woman down who had been stricken by some sort of evil spell. He claimed they prayed over the woman for six hours, and at some point her stomach inflated and a "12-to-18-inch lizard" was "expelled from the woman’s vagina, and it was caught."

Per Bay Area News Group, Vallejo also recounted a recorded conversation between Hernandez and her brother at the police station in which she allegedly said "that God had taken [Arely] and everything was going to be ok," and she said "it’s going to look like we intended to kill her, but we did not."

The defense attorney for Huezo, Dana Fite, only just began cross-examining Vallejo at the end of the hearing Monday. As Bay Area News Group reports, Fite was attempting to establish that the defendants had no homicidal intent and were only trying to help the girl, via the exorcism.

Previously: Grandfather and Uncle Arrested In San Jose Exorcism Murder Case