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Esdras Marroquin Gomez, an ex-day laborer also known as “Victor,” was sentenced on Thursday, June 13, in Westchester County Court, to 22 years to life in prison after pleading guilty to second-degree murder earlier this year.
On Nov. 9, 2015, at approximately 5 p.m., a farmworker found Colley’s body lying in a pool of blood in her home’a laundry room after she had been bludgeoned to death at the family's North Salem farm. Westchester County District Attorney Anthony A. Scarpino Jr. said that Colley, “the elderly matriarch of a prominent family” who had been alone at the time of her death, suffered severe trauma to the head and face.
During the initial investigation, police found the pin of a discharged fire extinguisher near Colley’s body and later found the extinguisher wrapped in a plastic bag in a pond on her 300-acre estate. Further tests by forensic scientists determined that Colley’s DNA was on the murder weapon.
New York State Police investigators and the DA’s office conducted hundreds of interviews and reviewed video surveillance which led them to Gomez in 2016, though he had fled to Guatemala the year before. An “intensive” international manhunt was launched, which led to the arrest of Gomez in Mexico before he was returned to Westchester.
Prosecutors said that the motive for the killing stemmed from a dispute with the Colley family that began in 2012 while Gomez was a day laborer at the farm.
At sentencing, Colley’s husband and granddaughter spoke to the court, while Gomez’s lawyer spoke on behalf of her Guatemalan client. She reportedly stated that Gomez didn’t have intentions of killing Colley on the day of her murder, he instead went to speak with her.
While on the run, Gomez was indicted by a grand jury in Westchester on the murder charge. He was arraigned in Westchester County Court in November 2017 and has been detained since as he awaited sentencing.
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