Outraged shouts echoed in a Riverhead courtroom Wednesday after a New York City Police Academy instructor pleaded guilty to killing his fiancee in a deal that will send him to prison for 10 years.
Alexis Chaparro, 28, had initially been charged with second-degree murder after police found Sonia Garcia, 27, also a New York Police Department officer, shot to death in the bedroom of their Bay Shore home last year. The maximum penalty for second-degree murder is 25 years to life in prison. Chaparro pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter.
Members of Garcia's family reacted angrily to what they called a lenient sentence, some weeping audibly in court, others shaking their heads or clutching their hair. At one point, the victim's brother Ramon Hernandez, 32, shouted expletives and lunged at Chaparro until a scrum of family members and court officers hustled him out the door.
This came shortly after Chaparro admitted that after being roused from sleep on the fatal night, he pulled his service pistol from beneath his pillow and fired it.
"What did you fire it at?" Assistant District Attorney Janet Albertson asked him.
"A shadow," Chaparro said.
Albertson then asked if he discovered that he'd just shot his fiancee.
"Yes," Chaparro murmured.
Outside court, Garcia's sister, Evelyn Hernandez, 26, of Park Slope, said Chaparro "basically got away with murder."
Hernandez said she now believes Chaparro killed Garcia because she discovered he was in the midst of a homosexual love affair.
"My sister walked in on him with another man," Hernandez said. "That's why she's dead."
But Albertson said police found no indication this was true. "After three months of investigation, there is no evidence to support that scenario," she said outside court.
Chaparro's lawyer, William Keahon of Islandia, declined to comment outside court. Keahon has consistently argued that his client only remembers falling asleep the night his fiancee was shot and killed, and that he had worried about burglars entering their home in the days leading up to her death.
Albertson called the plea deal the best the district attorney's office could do considering the shifting legal definition of the specific charge handed up by the grand jury, second-degree murder by depraved indifference.
Early in the case, the district attorney's office had presented two charges to the grand jury: intentional murder and depraved indifference murder. It indicted Chaparro only on the depraved indifference charge, accusing him of acting with such reckless disregard for human life that he merited the same blame as a person who'd acted intentionally.
It was a hard charge to prove given the facts of the case, Albertson said, and so "both sides gave up something to get something."
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