Queens man who murdered wife, 2 young daughters gets 45 years in prison
NEW YORK (WABC) -- A Queens man who admitted to stabbing his wife and their two young daughters to death in January was sentenced to 45 years in prison on Friday.
Miguel Mejia-Ramos, 28, pleaded guilty in October to manslaughter as part of a plea deal. Prosecutors said Mejia-Ramos stabbed his family after seeing a picture of his wife with another man.
He had been charged with six counts of first- and second-degree murder and criminal possession of a weapon in the deaths of 21-year-old Deisy Garcia, 2-year-old Daniela Mejia and 1-year-old Yoslin Mejia.
He was arrested in Texas.
Mejia-Ramos had been out drinking at a friend's house the night of the murders. When he returned home around 11 p.m., he rifled through his wife's phone and Facebook account and found an image of her with another man.
He snapped, grabbed a knife from a butcher block and stood over his sleeping wife and two daughters. Garcia awoke and screamed, and Mejia-Ramos stabbed her as she got out of bed and tried to run to another room. Mejia-Ramos then grabbed another knife and stabbed her multiple times in the torso, chest and back.
According to investigators, Mejia-Ramos then saw Daniela had woken up, so he picked her up, hugged and kissed her, asked for forgiveness and then stabbed her to death before doing the same thing with Yoselin.
The crime was so violent that the knife he used actually fell apart during the commission of it. In court, the victims' mother/grandmother spoke about how the horrific ordeal has destroyed the family, while the victims' sister/aunt called Mejia-Ramos a monster.
The judge didn't mince words, saying no sentence could possibly be enough for such a unspeakable crime.
"You killed the mother of your children, the mother of your two children without even the thought of how their lives would go on without their mother," Hon. Kenneth Holder said. "Then, as though that was not enough, you turned and looked at your two sleeping children, kissed them, and one after the other, commenced to stab them to death while they slept."
"I truly believe," he went on, "that the person who invented the electric chair or the gas chamber must certainly have had you in mind when they designed it."
An attorney for the family said the plea deal was agreeable to them because it spared them the agony and pain of having to listen to the details and see the evidence of the crime during a public trial.
