Family of CT mom killed, buried behind restaurant: 25-year sentence for ex lacks justice

An East Haven man has been sentenced to 25 years in prison for the murder of his girlfriend who was found buried in a shallow grave behind a Branford restaurant nearly four years ago.

Jonathan Jara-Aucapina appeared in court in New Haven on Tuesday afternoon and was sentenced to 25 years in prison as part of a plea deal. The 30-year-old, who faced up to 60 years in prison if he had been convicted at trial, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in February.

The charges against Jara-Aucapina stem from the 2020 killing of Lizzbeth Aleman-Popoca, who was the mother of Jara-Aucapina’s daughter and his longtime girlfriend.

Aleman-Popoca disappeared from her home on July 1, 2020 and was missing for 16 days before her body was found behind the dumpsters behind LoMonaco’s Ristorante, where Jara-Aucapina had worked part-time.

Advocates who have been working with Aleman-Popoca’s family since she disappeared are hoping her case brings attention to other cases of missing and murdered women in Connecticut.

“Lizzbeth represents the countless women who go missing every year, and in some cases, are later found dead,” said Vanessa Emely Suarez, founder of the advocacy group Vivan Las Autonomas.

As Jara-Aucapina’s case came to a close this week, Suarez said the group and Aleman-Popoca’s family wanted to “call attention to the growing issue of femicide right here in our city and state.”

“Lizzbeth’s murder is one of many femicide deaths, reported as intimate-partner homicides, that occur on a yearly basis throughout Connecticut though few cases result in murder convictions,” she said.

According to the Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence, an average of 14 people are killed by an intimate partner in Connecticut each year. In 2022, 16 people were killed by their intimate partners in the state.

Suarez said Aleman-Popoca’s family hoped for a longer sentence for Jara-Aucapina, of at least 40 years. To the family, Suarez said, 25 years does not feel like justice.

“There’s is no amount of time that will bring Lizzbeth back or feel like any amount of justice,” she said.

“True justice would have just meant a more severe sentence and that we take Lizzbeth’s death seriously and prevent more women from being murdered,” Suarez said. “That would empower the family a lot more. They won’t have their daughter back but at least more women aren’t being taken in this way.

“It’s really tragic and devastating to know that even after everything we’ve done for Lizzbeth, she’s not going to be the last murdered or missing woman in East Haven or in Connecticut,” Suarez added.

Nika Zarazvand, an advocate of Vivan Las Autonomas who is a friend of Aleman-Popoca’s sister and started working with the family back in 2020, said she hopes to see people who kill women face an entirely different criminal charge, adding a hate crime element to the homicide charge and classifying women’s murders as femicides.

“What I think families would like to see in the future is acknowledgement that their loved one was killed for being a woman,” she said.

Zarazvand was in the courtroom as the sentence was handed down and said the atmosphere in the room was heavy as Aleman-Popoca’s family faced what they felt was an unjust conclusion to the criminal case.

“At the end of the day I think they realized that this is not a happy ending for them,” she said. “And I think for us, as advocates of gender-based violence, there’s a question of why are women’s deaths treated as regular homicides? Why are they not classified as a hate crime where they were killed for being women?”

Zarazvand said she thinks Aleman-Popoca was vulnerable because she was a woman, and even more vulnerable because she was an undocumented immigrant. Aleman-Popoca was from Guerrero, Mexico but lived in East Haven with Jara-Aucapina and their daughter.

“Sitting in that courtroom it was really hard not to think about all of the apparatuses of the state, all of the institutions had failed Lizzbeth before the moment that Jonathan killed her,” she said.

She noted the fear and financial insecurity women face when leaving an abusive intimate partner, and said that Aleman-Popoca’s situation was made more difficult by her immigration status.

“I’ve seen undocumented women face increased barriers to finding safety to finding shelter because they are undocumented, and so they are at increased danger,” she said.

Before the case even came into a courtroom, Zarazvand said, Aleman-Popoca’s family had to advocate for justice.

Court records showed that investigators learned that Jara-Aucapina had crafted a story that Aleman-Popoca had run off. They believe that Jara-Aucapina used that story to lie to family and law enforcement when she was reported missing, police have said.

The now-convicted murderer was reportedly seen purchasing a hoe and shovel at the Home Depot in East Haven before driving out to the restaurant near where she was found, court records show.

Jara-Aucapina was arrested at a New Haven diner on Dec. 27, 2020, according to court records.

Capt. Joseph Murgo, a spokesperson for the East Haven police, previously described the disappearance as a “very complex investigative case that took over 2,000 hours to investigate.”

Advocates say that as soon as Aleman-Popoca was found dead, it was clear that something terrible had happened to her.

“From the moment Lizzbeth’s lifeless body was found, it was clear to her family, authorities and community members that Lizzbeth had been violently murdered,” Suarez said.

Suarez said Aleman-Popoca’s family were willing to take the case to trial, but that decision was not in their hands.

“It’s really hard for families, even when they’ve made the step to go to trial … that it’s not really their decision it’s up to the defendant,” Suarez said. “Even when a family is entirely involved and invested, even then, the system has very few opportunities for the families to direct the case themselves in a direction that they think is fair to them.”

Once the case moved through the court process, Suarez said the family continued advocating for justice as plea deals were proposed. They advocated to keep the murder charge levied against and to not accept a plea deal that downgraded that charge to first-degree manslaughter, Suarez said.

“As advocates we worked very closely with Lizzabeth’s family, her sister and her father, and there’s been a lot of grief that they’ve had to carry,” she said. “They were very adamant about pursuing a murder charge … they were against accepting a plea deal that reduced charges to voluntary manslaughter,” or additional charges that were connected to the way he disposed of her body.

“None of those charges captured the reality or the gravity of his violent actions and for that reason the family struggled a lot with accepting that plea deal,” she said. “This has always been a battle about acknowledging the truth of what really happened to her and asking the system to do the same.”

According to Department of Correction records, Jara-Aucapina has been in custody since Dec. 28, 2020 and is being held at the MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution in Suffield.