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Esdras Marroquin Gomez, an ex-day laborer also known as “Victor,” admitted to second-degree murder in Westchester County Court on Monday, May 6, and will face 25 years to life in prison when he is sentenced on June 13.
According to a lohud report, Gomez was pursuing a worker’s compensation claim against the Colleys after he was injured while working on their farm. At approximately 5 p.m. on Nov. 9, 2015, Gomez returned to the 300-acre estate, grabbed a small fire extinguisher and bludgeoned Colley when she confronted him on the property.
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 estate. Further tests by forensic scientists determined that Colley’s DNA was on the murder weapon.
It is unclear why Gomez was on the property on the day of the murder, though it is not believed that he was there to murder Gomez. Assistant District Attorney Julie Cornachio reportedly said that “we think he wanted money.”
Scarpino said that New York State Police investigators and his 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
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 trial before pleading guilty on Monday.
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