Plea Deal Offered for Woman in Florida Teen’s Machete Death

MIAMI (AP) — A girl accused of collaborating within the machete killing of a South Florida teen virtually seven years in the past is ready to take a plea deal that will permit her to keep away from a life sentence, her legal professional instructed a decide.

Desiray Strickland was 19 when she and 4 others had been arrested following the June 2015 loss of life of 17-year-old Jose Amaya Guardado. Police stated he was hacked to loss of life and buried in a shallow grave in Homestead.

“I didn’t kill that boy, I promise!” Strickland screamed at a Miami-Dade detective in a police interrogation video.

However on Wednesday in Miami, Strickland’s legal professional instructed Circuit Choose Cristina Miranda she plans to plead responsible to conspiracy to homicide, which may ship her to jail for 15 years, the Miami Herald reported.

“We had been hoping to do (the plea deal) at this time, however some phrases had been modified and he or she needed to debate them together with her mom and father,” legal professional Scott Sakin instructed the Herald.

The following listening to within the case is scheduled for late June. Strickland stays in jail.

Strickland and 4 others had been indicted by a grand jury on first-degree homicide expenses. Prosecutors stated they killed Guardado, who was a fellow scholar on the Homestead Job Corps, a federally run residential college for at-risk youth.

Prosecutors stated Strickland’s boyfriend, Kaheem Arbelo, swung the blows that killed Guardado, and in 2017 the state legal professional’s workplace determined to hunt the loss of life penalty for him however not the opposite 4 defendants.

Police stated Strickland and Arbelo had intercourse within the woods after the boy’s physique was buried. And witnesses instructed detectives that Strickland “complained that she had missed the primary collection of machete strikes as a result of she had walked away for a couple of minutes to urinate within the woods,” a arrest report stated.

Authorities imagine the teenager was killed over a debt owed to Arbelo, who was a suspected drug supplier.

Fellow college students Jonathan Lucas, Christian Colon and Joseph Michael Cabrera had been additionally charged in Jose’s loss of life, data present.

Arbelo, Lucas and Colon confessed once they had been detained in August 2015, police stated.

Lucas and Cabrera pleaded responsible to a cost of conspiracy to commit homicide in 2020. Lucas was sentenced to 5 years in jail and 15 years’ probation. Cabrera obtained much less punishment, the newspaper reported.

Arbelo and Colon have each been detained since August 2015, and are nonetheless awaiting trial.

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