Posted on 05/15/2006 9:56:33 AM PDT by Puppage
NEW CITY, N.Y. -- The laborer who raped and murdered a suburban housewife in her bedroom after being hired to clean a backyard deck was sentenced Monday to life in prison without chance of parole.
The sentence was imposed after the victim's husband, Daniel Nagle, said Douglas Herrera Castellanos "beat, cut, raped, sodomized and strangled the greatest love of my life and the mother of my two children."
The sentencing came on what would have been the 13th wedding anniversary for Nagle and his wife Mary.
Nagle, looking at Herrera, told him, "I hope that you wake up every single day and know that you ended your life on the same day you ended Mary's."
The father of two said he and his children had visited his wife's grave on Mother's Day, and he told the court how his 7-year-old son Chris asked, "Will we ever be OK? Will we ever be normal? Will we learn to live with only the three of us?"
Herrera was convicted last month of first-degree murder in the killing of Mary Nagle, 42, at her home in New City. A Guatemalan immigrant working for a house-painting contractor, he had been assigned to power-wash the Nagles' backyard deck.
According to trial testimony, Herrera, 30, entered the unlocked house and climbed the stairs to the master bedroom, where Nagle was changing into a tennis outfit. In an attack the medical examiner described as the worst she'd ever seen, Herrera raped, stabbed, bludgeoned and choked the fighting victim to death.
As he fled, Herrera allegedly used Nagle's cell phone to call several women, including one of her five sisters, and spoke lewdly about what had happened to her.
Herrera, whose visa expired five years ago, testified that he had partied on beer and cocaine the night before and did not remember entering the house or killing Nagle. However, he said, he did recall waking up next to her bloody body.
At the sentencing, he said, "I would do anything to change what happened. Forgive me." A weeping Daniel Nagle listened from the gallery.
The killing, in a quiet, tidy neighborhood, had exposed the danger of a common situation in the suburbs -- the wife home alone and a handyman on the scene, often with access to the house. Many area residents said they have changed their habits because of the killing.
With the state's death penalty ruled unconstitutional, the maximum sentence Herrera could get was life in prison without parole, and Rockland County District Attorney Michael Bongiornio told state Supreme Court Justice William Kelly that Herrera deserved the maximum. "I have rarely seen a case with this level of brutality and sadism," he said.
Kelly then imposed the sentence, saying he wanted to guarantee that Herrera "will never have the chance" to commit another crime.
Several of the jurors wept during the trial when they viewed grisly photos of the body as the medical examiner described the gashes, hemorrhages and mutilations Nagle suffered.
Jurors also wept when an old photo of Nagle, showing her smiling and radiant, was projected onto a screen in the courtroom after Daniel Nagle testified about seeing her body at the morgue.
They took less than four hours to convict Herrera of 15 felonies, including first-degree murder, second-degree murder, rape, robbery, burglary, engaging in a criminal sex act and aggravated criminal sex abuse.
"ILLEGAL ALIEN, JUST DOING THE JOB ORDINARY AMERICANS REFUSE TO DO."
Yup!
What would we do without em?
Kill, rape, molest, rob, carjack, knife fight, beat up women and children, drive drunk without licenses or insurance, fly planes into buildings, oops, forgot, some of them were here legally.
I suspect that if you just went after the employers (as well as unscrupulous homeowners who hire these people), and began denying government benefits to illegal aliens, most would self-deport. Then we'd spend a few billion to deport the hangers-on. Problem solved.
Bttt
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