Skip to main content

Featured Post

CALIFORNIA FIRE: 62,000 People Have Fled Blaze

Post a Comment

Teen Pleads Guilty of Rape, Murder of 12-year-Old Girl He Lured with Tale of a Lost Dog

A Utah teen, who lured his 12-year-old neighbor from home by claiming he needed her help to find his lost cat, has pleaded guilty to the girl's 2015 rape and murder, according to multiple news sources.


Jayden Sterzer, now 18 – who sexually assaulted and then strangled Kailey Vijil with his tank top – is likely to remain in juvenile detention for another three years until he turns 21, then faces a possible adult prison term of 15 years to life, reports the The Salt Lake Tribune,  the local TV station Fox13 Salt Lake City and Good4Utah.com.


Sterzer was 15 at the time the crimes were committed but his legal team claims he has the intellectual capacity of a toddler. On Monday he accepted blame by pleading guilty in juvenile court to rape of a child, followed by guilty pleas in adult court to first-degree murder and second-degree sexual abuse of a child.


He will be formally sentenced Jan. 19 on the juvenile court plea, then return at a later date to face sentencing on the adult court pleas.


Sterzer's attorney said the "blended" plea deal was in his client's best interest after juvenile court Judge James Michie found Sterzer competent to stand trial, rejecting the defense argument that the accused teen didn't understand the charges against him.


"Because he operates at such a young age — intellectually he operates about at the level of a third-grader — it was very important to do what we could to keep him in the juvenile system for the next three years," said defense attorney Michael Sikora. "We don't think he was in any way, shape or form, prepared for a lengthy stay at the Utah state prison."


• Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Click here to get breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases in the True Crime Newsletter.


The victim's family reacted to the guilty pleas through their attorney, Spencer Banks.


“It’s been an unbearable 2½ years that they’ve had to go through,” said Banks. "[The plea deal] assures he will be in custody for an extremely long time, and that’s where they take the most comfort.”


He added: "There's was no resolution even if this had gone to trial and been convicted on both counts. There's no ending to this that is completely satisfying or [will] bring complete closure to them. But all things considered they are happy with this."

Sterzer's attorney's did not dispute that he sexually assaulted and strangled Vijil after enlisting her help to find the fake missing cat just before midnight on July 16, 2015.

Her body was found about 90 minutes later in a horse pasture a half-mile from her family's home in the Salt Lake City suburb of West Valley City.

Referring to the upcoming sentencing hearing, Judge Michie told Sterzer in court following his plea, “Now the tide has turned, finally, and our focus is not going to be just on you anymore. Our focus is also going to be on Kailey and her family and what you took from them.”

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

your comment is valuable

Popular posts from this blog

CALIFORNIA FIRE: 62,000 People Have Fled Blaze

  The evacuations have come amid a grueling heat wave, the coronavirus pandemic and air thick with smoke. The wildfires have burned through more than 350,000 acres. The wildfires that continued to rip across Northern California on Thursday have forced 62,000 people from their homes and threaten evacuations for 100,000 more. Firefighters have struggled to contain the blazes, and massive smoke clouds have harmed the air quality. A large group of fires burning in wine country west of Sacramento had grown to cover 131,000 acres, according to Cal Fire, the state’s fire authority. The agency said that, in all, nearly 350,000 acres have burned in Northern and Central California, with many fires sparked by lightning strikes in the high heat and then fanned by winds. Those conditions helped new fires sprout across the state on Wednesday and Thursday, and caused other fires to merge, complicating efforts to contain the combined blazes. Almost two dozen major fires were reported on Wednesday,...
Post a Comment
Read more

#Coronavirus & Flu - Washing hands for 20 seconds could keep you clear.

With flu season in full swing and the   coronavirus spreading rapidly throughout China, it's more important than ever that people take precautions to stay healthy. Officials in China   have confirmed more than 6,000 cases   of the respiratory illness and 132 deaths, and there have been five confirmed cases of the disease in the United States. As for the flu, there have been at least 15 million American cases this season  as of Jan. 18 , including 8,200 deaths — 54 of which were pediatric deaths. According to the   Centers for Disease Control , one of the best ways to protect yourself from these illnesses is to wash your hands often, and with the right technique. When your hands are clean, you can prevent germs from spreading from one person to another. To successfully wash hands, follow these five steps recommended by the CDC. First, wet your hands with clean, running water — warm or cold. After turning off the tap, apply soap to your hands and rub t...
Post a Comment
Read more

ALWAYS A LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS

Many have been so broken, to the extend they see everything about life as dark. Some have even lost the hope of anything good in life. So take life as "Nothing good comes out of it". Verse versa, So many good people have spent their entire life tagging some others as total darkness, but No, there is nothing of such as total darkness, there is always a light in every darkness, waiting to shine, but it needs more attention to do that. Remember, " more charging time is to power the brightness of the touch" the moment you stop charging, then gradually it goes brim and finally dies off. So have we failed to help some people let their light shine by casting them out, not giving a single chance to them. So I inspire you today to stand by those whom you ones tagged as darkness, you could do that from a far not necessarily physically close. The same goes to you who have tagged the world as dark and given up hope, there are is a light out there for you deep within the darkne...
1 comment
Read more