Confessed Accomplice Details Law Prof's Murder in Florida
Luis Rivera testified for more than two hours Tuesday, implicating defendants Sigfredo Garcia and Katherine Magbanua in the 2014 murder of Florida State law professor Dan Markel.
October 01, 2019 at 05:38 PM
3 minute read
Florida State law professor Dan Markel was shot twice at close range by Sigfredo Garcia on July 19, 2014, in a murder-for-hire plot that Garcia's sometimes girlfriend Katherine Magbanua helped arrange, according to testimony from a key prosecution witness.
Luis Rivera on Tuesday told a Tallahassee, Florida, jury that he and his childhood friend Garcia were paid to travel from Miami to Tallahassee to kill the law professor so that Markel's ex-wife Wendi Adelson would be able to relocate to South Florida with the couple's two children—a move the former spouses had wrangled over in court. Garcia and Magbanua are standing trial for first-degree murder, while Rivera in 2016 pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. He received a seven-year sentence in exchange for cooperating with prosecutors. (Rivera, who was a leader of the Latin Kings gang in Miami, is currently serving 12 years in a federal prison on racketeering charges, with the second-degree murder sentence to run concurrently.)
"He said, 'We're going to have to kill a man for some kids,'" Rivera testified, dressed in a dark blue prison uniform. "Because the lady wants her kids back."
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