Father of Keishla Rodríguez denies prosecution offered plea bargain to her accused killer Verdejo
By The Star Staff
The father of Keishla Rodríguez Ortiz, José Antonio Rodríguez, said earlier this week that the accomplice of his daughter’s alleged killer, Félix Verdejo, pleaded guilty to seek a plea bargain for a lighter sentence. However, he refuted rumors that the prosecution was making a plea bargain offer to Verdejo.
“Obviously, they supposedly paid him to commit the crime against my daughter and what happened happened,” Rodríguez said. “Listening to how it happened is very sad because he accepted everything that the prosecutor was ruling on.”
He was talking about Luis Antonio “Tony” Cádiz Martínez, the 31-year-old man who helped the professional boxer commit Keishla’s murder.
The most difficult part of the statement for Rodríguez was hearing how close the murder was to the home of his daughter, who was killed after crossing the street from the complex where she lived to Verdejo’s car. He did not know the accomplice to the slaying before the events that occurred and saw him for the first time this week in court.
“The boxer gave the most forceful blows when he ‘knocked her out,’ because they injected her with drugs and proceeded to tie her up,” Rodríguez said about the details confirmed by the co-defendant Monday.
Although the deceased girl’s father is satisfied with Cádiz Martínez’s statement, he firmly denies that the prosecution offered Verdejo an agreement in exchange for a lighter sentence.
“The minimum [sentence] against him is 100 years; he doesn’t get out of jail anymore. […] Let them give him life in jail,” Rodríguez reiterated. “My daughter is not alive because she was pregnant. […] That was the purpose, to end the pregnancy. My daughter is no longer here but nothing is going to bring her back to me.”