Carmelo Mendoza pleaded guilty to fatally stabbing his wife Yaquelin Collado (45) during an argument while the woman’s daughter watched helplessly in her apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens (NYC).
Mendoza, 44, is expected to be sentenced to 18 years to life in prison for the crime committed on July 3, 2020, on 34th Road, Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz said. Collado, owner of a beauty salon in Elmhurst, received more than 27 stab wounds to the chest, neck and torso.
The couple were fighting that morning when Collado’s 19-year-old daughter tried to intervene and saw Mendoza stab her mother repeatedly in the chest, neck and torso. The teen threw various objects at him and pushed him, but Mendoza continued to stab Collado until the injured mother told her daughter to get away to save her life, the prosecutor said.
Collado’s daughter began pounding on neighbors’ doors for help, then called her boyfriend and the police. Authorities found Mendoza lying on Collado bleeding on the floor with a kitchen knife nearby. The attacker had stabbed himself several times in the abdomen, but he survived, he recalled. Queens Chronicle.
In a similar case, in February César Santana was indicted on suspicion of killing his ex-partner Luz Hernández, a Dominican kindergarten teacher in Jersey City whose body was found in a shallow grave in Kearny, NJ.
Days before, Dominican brothers Gualberto and Gilberto Lebrón were convicted in connection with the death of Julia Vega, a daycare worker whose body was found in garbage bags behind an abandoned house in New Jersey in 2018.
In July 2022, Raúl José Santos was arrested after the New York police found his Dominican wife stabbed to death in their home in the Bronx.
In September 2020, a Dominican Uber driver was stabbed to death by her husband in Queens (NYC). The same fatal fate occurred in that county in August 2019, also Dominican Carmen Iris Santiago, attacked by her ex-convict husband, from whom she was separated from her, in the nail salon where she worked.
All charges are mere accusations and those charged are presumed innocent until proven guilty in court.
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