'She was my best friend': Friends say slain Lake Wales teacher had a big heart

Friends of slain teacher Marlene Pizarro said she had a big heart and kept very busy as an mother, entrepreneur and educator.

Pizarro, 40, and her three kids were shot to death Tuesday by her boyfriend, Al Joseph Stenson, 38, who was later fatally shot by police following a standoff outside a Sanford motel where his brother was staying, police said.

In 2018, Stanlena Willis first met Pizarro working for SLA Management, a private food-service company for charter and private schools. She was Pizarro's supervisor and Pizarro was a cook for SLA at the middle school, Discovery Academy of Lake Alfred.

They soon became friends.

“She was my best friend,” she said on Thursday by phone. “She was a very, very sweet-hearted person She was a good mother. She was a good, good friend. A good listener, a very good listener. She had a big heart. She really did.”

Willis, 36, of Winter Haven recalled Pizarro traveling back to her native Puerto Rico with her kids during summer breaks from teaching and taking her kids to the local water parks. Pizarro just gained her teaching credentials in recent years to teach students with disabilities and had a side business selling products for NuSkin as an affiliate, she said.

“Just last year, all this was going for her,” she said. “She was getting everything together for herself.”

Lately, the two friends had been doing online yoga classes together. “She was very athletic,” she said. Pizarro also loved dogs and bred French Bulldogs.

She said Pizarro attended church and was close to her mother, who had relocated recently to Polk County from Puerto Rico.

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She never spoke about her boyfriend. Willis said he was a truck driver and was not home that often.

It was at Pizarro's Lake Wales apartment along Dawnlight Drive at the Sunrise Apartments where detectives determined Stenson had shot the victims at about 5 a.m. Tuesday before he fled the scene. The crime was reported to police at 8:51 p.m. when family members discovered the bodies.

Pizarro was found dead with her three children ages 21, 17 and 11. Her daughter, Ariana Pizarro, 17, a senior at Lake Wales High School, was readying to graduate in two weeks. Several reports, including a statement posted to Facebook by the Warner University teacher education program, said the 11-year-old attended Hillcrest Elementary School in Lake Wales.

Hillcrest Principal Rebecca Thomas declined to comment and directed further comments to the Lake Wales Charter Schools office.

The events that led to the shootings remain a mystery, as police said they did not have a motive but their investigation is ongoing. Law enforcement agencies involved in the case had still not released further details as of Friday.

Attempts to reach family members for this report were unsuccessful.

Pizarro's brother, Julian Ramos, set up a GoFundMe web page for donations to help the family members return the victims back to Puerto Rico for burial. By about noon Friday, the goal of $30,000 had been surpassed.

He went to Facebook and posted a note and a video in Spanish thanking those who have shown their support for his sister, nephew and nieces. "I've been trying my hardest not to fail even its hard so let's keep sharing the link (at GoFundMe) to hit this goal for Marlene Pizarro," he wrote.

In Puerto Rico, Pizarro had grown up and had completed some college courses. She transferred credits from her time at the college to the teacher education program at Warner University in Lake Wales.

Her professor for three classes in the program was Warner's director of teacher education, Lori Hutto, 53, of Lake Wales. Hutto recalls she did everything to make the lives of her kids better, which makes the tragedy even more difficult to process.

“She was pretty phenomenal,” Hutto said, as a mother and teacher. “She was in our online program and we usually don't get to know those students as much as we do our face-to-face students.”

But about once a month, Hutto would get calls or visits from Pizarro asking how she could improve instruction to her disabled students suffering emotional or physical disabilities such as dyslexia, as well as go over her classroom experience as a paraprofessional first and then as an ESE teacher.

“Our conversations are something that I will always treasure,” Hutto said.

“The first thing she said to us was 'I want to make a better life for my children,' and just knowing that they died along with her makes this even more unimaginable.” Hutto said.

“They were her first priority, but you know, like I said, her classroom students, those were her children too,” Hutto said. “They were just an extension of her family and she was just phenomenal.”

Pizarro chose a Christian university to study to be a teacher because, she told Hutto, “ I want to learn how to teach from a Christian university because this is something that God put in my life.”

Hutto said Pizarro “was an amazing person” who acted “out of the goodness of her heart,” she was “genuinely kind” and “always put other people before herself.”

Pizzaro, who was bilingual in Spanish and English, graduated from Warner University in 2020 after about four years of study. She had already gained classroom instruction experience by the time she took a teaching position at Lake Wales High School upon graduation.

Hutto added, “She just had that kind of personality that, you know, you spent 10 minutes with her and you couldn't wait to talk to her again just because of her passion for life.”

This article originally appeared on The Ledger: Friends say slain Lake Wales teacher had a big heart and stayed busy