SAN DIEGO -- The wife of a Miramar-based Marine poisoned her 23-year-old husband and used his military life insurance payout to buy breast implants, a prosecutor said Thursday, but the woman's attorney denied that his client committed the crime.

Cynthia Sommer, a 33-year-old mother of four, is charged with murder and special circumstance allegations of murder by poison and murder for financial gain in the the Feb. 18, 2002, death of Sgt. Todd Sommer.

District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis decided against seeking the death penalty, so the defendant faces life in prison without the possibility of parole if convicted.

Deputy District Attorney Laura Gunn told jurors in her opening statement that the victim became sick a week before his death, and the only people near him besides his wife were the couple's baby son and her three young children from a previous marriage.

The victim's death was originally classified as resulting from natural causes, but a subsequent test in 2003 for heavy metals found lethal levels of arsenic in his kidneys and liver, Gunn told the jury.

In his opening statement, defense attorney Robert Udell said there would be no evidence presented at the trial that connects his client to arsenic.

After a failed marriage that produced three children, Cynthia Sommer met the “man of her dreams” and married Todd Sommer in 1999, Udell said.

“This was her knight in shining armor,” the attorney said. “She could not have asked for a more perfect man.”

Udell said evidence in the trial would show that Sommer's ``goal in life was to be the wife of a Marine.''

The attorney said fellow Marines who accompanied the victim on a Feb. 8, 2002, trip to El Centro said he ate some egg rolls on the way home, which Udell suggested were the cause of Todd Sommer's illness and subseequent death.

Udell played a tape of the 911 call placed by the defendant.

Sommer is heard to say, “Honey, I love you. Don't do this to me. What am I going to do without you?”

Udell said his client lost benefits and free housing after her husband died.

“The evidence will show Cindy Sommer did not benefit financially from Todd's death,” Udell told the jury. “The evidence will show that Todd was the best thing that ever happened to her.”

When he died, the defendant's life came crashing down, and she didn't have a motive to kill him, Udell said.

But Gunn said that although the defendant displayed an appropriate response when she called 911 the morning the victim collapsed in their bedroom, she made an unusual comment to one of the emergency responders as they took her lifeless husband to the hospital.

“She said, ‘We joked about the life insurance policy, but I never thought I'd actually see it,’” the prosecutor told the jury.

When an official spoke to the defendant at the hospital, she asked, “Am I going to have to give back his bonus?” according to the prosecutor.

Sommer told agents from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service that her husband got “violently ill” on Feb. 8, 2002, 10 days before his death.

She told investigators that the Marine sought treatment, eventually recovered and went back to work but complained the night before he died that his heart was fluttering, according to Gunn.

The day after Todd Sommer died, his wife got a $6,000 death gratuity payment from the military, and a month later, she received more than $250,000 from his military life insurance policy, the prosecutor said.

In 2001, the military turned down the defendant's application for a loan because they said she wasn't living within the family's means, Gunn said.

A trust fund in Todd Sommer's name was also drained by Jan. 31, 2002, the prosecutor said.

On Feb. 8, 2002, the defendant consulted a plastic surgeon in La Jolla for breast augmentation, and two months later paid $5,400 for the procedure, the prosecutor said.

The defendant lied when she said her husband went with her to the Feb. 8 appointment, the prosecutor said.

Two months after his death, the defendant started a relationship with a new boyfriend, Gunn told the jury.