Man given life sentences, to serve minimum of 50 years, for murdering grandparents

Megan Banta, Register-Guard
·1 min read
A U.S. judge decided last month that Grants Pass violated its homeless residents' Eighth Amendment rights by excluding them from parks without due process and citing them for sleeping outside.
A U.S. judge decided last month that Grants Pass violated its homeless residents' Eighth Amendment rights by excluding them from parks without due process and citing them for sleeping outside.

A Lane County judge sentenced a 27-year-old to at least 50 years in prison for the 2021 murder of his grandparents.

Nicholas Borden-Cortez was sentenced last week to life in prison with a minimum 30-year sentence for each of the two counts of first-degree murder.

He'll serve the majority of the time consecutively — 30 years on the first count, then 20 years on the second count — before being eligible for parole. He'll serve 10 years of the second count at the same time as the first sentence.

Borden-Cortez pleaded guilty in June to the May 2021 murder of his grandparents, 85-year-old Nancy Loucks-Morris and 87-year-old Gerald Morris.

As part of his guilty plea, prosecutors dropped two charges of second-degree abuse of a corpse and a felony charge of attempting to elude a police officer in a vehicle, as well as a separate but related case with two charges of unlawful firearm use.

Police responded to a report of "suspicious conditions" at a home in the Falconwood Mobile Home Park in northern Eugene just before 10:30 a.m. May 6, 2021, according to a news release.

Officers arrested Borden-Cortez at 1 p.m. that same day after a vehicle chase that ended at the intersection of Main Street and Bob Straub Parkway in Springfield, the news release added.

This article originally appeared on Register-Guard: Man sentenced for murdering grandparents in their Eugene home