More than a week after Melissa Huckaby was sentenced to life in prison for the kidnapping and murder of 8-year-old Sandra Cantu, many in the town the two called home seemed ready to leave the sordid tale in the past.

“We have to be done with this now,” said Susan Aceves, a Tracy woman who served on the grand jury that for two weeks reviewed the evidence against Huckaby and determined she should stand trial.

“You have to realize, we’ve been living with this for a year,” she continued. “It’s something a lot of us will never get over.”

Aceves wasn’t alone. Asked by the Press this week about their thoughts, reactions and feelings now that the Huckaby case appears ended, most people in downtown Tracy said it’s a matter best left alone.

Everyone interviewed said they were glad that the ordeal — which turned the town upside down for two weeks in 2009 when countless volunteers searched for the missing Sandra and law enforcement officials hunted for her killer — was over.

But not all agreed that Huckaby’s plea deal was the best thing in terms of justice. The deal spared Huckaby the death penalty and preserves the opportunity for her to have future contact with her young daughter.

“I don’t think that life imprisonment is an equal balance,” said Rosemary Lara, who added that Huckaby should have stood trial and received the death penalty if convicted. “It would have made me feel like justice was served.”

Bronwen Britton, a retired paralegal, disagreed.

“Personally, I’m very glad (Huckaby) admitted to it and they didn’t have to go to a trial. That would have been very hard on the family,” Britton said.

At the press conference following Huckaby’s conviction, prosecutor Thomas Testa explained that his primary goal was to get Huckaby locked away and off the streets, and the plea deal accomplished that. He added that any trial almost certainly would have been moved away from the Tracy area, increasing the time and money needed to resolve the case.

And if she were sentenced to death, the case likely would have spent years wending through the appeals process, dragging the family back into the ordeal again and again.

Archie Bakerink, the lawyer for Sandra’s mother, Maria Chavez, said the family had “no objection” to Huckaby’s plea deal, especially because they wanted to avoid a trial.

“They didn’t want to have to go through the pain of reliving it again,” Bakerink said.

As far as the whirlwind of media coverage that has surrounded the case itself and the families involved, opinions again differed — especially when it came to Judge Linda Lofthus unsealing the grand jury transcript and the media’s reporting of how Sandra was murdered and apparently abused.

“I, for one, don’t want to know all the gory details,” said Tracy resident Debra Palmquist. “I don’t want them to hurt the family or community.”

Bakerink said Sandra’s relatives are having a difficult time finding closure even now, because they have a “fear” of the autopsy report — which has not been released — becoming public.

He added that coverage of the details of the kidnapping and murder, revealed when the 1,900-page grand jury transcripts were released last week, “hasn’t helped” the family reach closure.

“I think the media coverage has probably made it worse,” he said.

Britton said having those details available is part of the democratic system.

“I think we have the constitutional right to know what happened,” she said. “Our legal institutions should be open, as uncomfortable as it is.”

Aceves, the grand juror, agreed. But she, like many others, said a certain amount of restraint should be exercised by those in the media.

“I didn’t have a problem with (the transcripts being unsealed) — that’s public record, and that is as it should be,” she said. “But any further delving is unnecessary.”

Thrown into the Cantu case after being called for a typical jury duty, Aceves hopes that she, as well as the community, can finally put the matter in the past.

“We spent over two weeks coming home and keeping our mouths shut … keeping this all inside your head,” Aceves said. “It was intense.

“I will not get past this. It’s something that’s going to be with me forever. So whatever we can do to put this behind us would be great.”

• Tracy Press reporter Jaclyn Hirsch contributed to this story.