Yonkers murder: Luis Alturet-Rivera guilty in 2017 killing of ex-girlfriend Diana Casado

The ex-boyfriend of a woman fatally shot in her car five years ago in Yonkers was convicted of second-degree murder Friday afternoon.

Jurors took less than 90 minutes to find Luis Alturet-Rivera guilty in the killing of 29-year-old Diana Casado.

Assistant District Attorney Christine O'Connor painted Alturet-Rivera as a controlling, jealous boyfriend who could not accept that the 12-year, off-and-on relationship was over.

"This is a classic, classic domestic violent relationship and a classic domestic violent homicide. It's textbook," O'Connor said in her summation Friday morning. "Her murder was not done on impulse. He carefully executed. It involved deliberation and planning and it was personal."

Trial: Ex-boyfriend charged with murder in Diana Casado's killing

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Early on the morning of Jan. 22, 2017, Casado was shot in the head just after parking in a Palisade Avenue lot near where she was living with her mother.

The mother worried for hours why Casado had not returned and discovered her mortally wounded just after 7:30 when she went to the lot to see if she had parked there.

There were no eyewitnesses to the killing but prosecutors built their case around videos showing Alturet-Rivera walking on nearby Ashburton Avenue and eventually dumping Casado's pocketbook in an attempt to make it appear Casado had been robbed.

They also used cellphone data to attack Alturet-Rivera's alibi that he was in the Bronx with another girlfriend at the time of the killing. An FBI agent testified that Alturet-Rivera's phone was pinging off cellphone towers in Yonkers and did not ping off Bronx towers until about 45 minutes after the shooting.

Casado's phone, which was never recovered, also pinged off a Bronx tower just after 5 a.m even though she lay dying then in Yonkers. Prosecutors argued that Alturet-Rivera took her phone after killing Casado to hide their communication that morning.

The precise time of the shooting was never determined but prosecutors relied on a neighbor who said she heard a gunshot at about 3 a.m. Her reliance on that time was also a focus of the defense case based on a crime scene detective's assessment of the surveillance video that Alturet-Rivera was halfway down Ashburton at 2:58 a.m.  His lawyers countered that he couldn't be the shooter if he was seen elsewhere when the witness claimed she heard the gunshot.

The only defense witness called by Allan Focarile and April McKenzie was their investigator at the Legal Aid Society, Perie Miranda. He detailed measuring the roughly six-tenths of a mile walk from the parking lot to the trash bin and told the jury that it took 11 minutes.

The 5-foot-6 ex-Greenburgh detective conceded to Assistant District Attorney John O'Rourke that a taller man — Alturet-Rivera, for example, is nearly 6-foot — might have walked faster, particularly if he had what the prosecutor called the "giddy-up" of someone wanting to distance themselves from a crime scene.

The couple had a tumultuous relationship although Casado never reported any abuse to police. They lived together in the Bronx until 2016, when Casado secretly planned a move to Florida, telling him she was just going for a visit. But she eventually returned later that year and moved in with her mother.

McKenzie suggested the two were on good terms and had both moved on from the relationship. She urged jurors to acquit Alturet-Rivera based on several factors, primarily the lack of any evidence that he had a gun that morning or physical evidence, like DNA, fingerprints, gunshot residue, that he was at the scene of the shooting.

"A young woman's life was taken," McKenzie said in her closing argument. "But in a rush to find the person who did this, to find someone to lock up, the Yonkers Police Department pointed their fingers at the easiest person to blame, her ex-boyfriend...But the evidence showed throughout this trial, shows, it establishes, that he was charged with a crime he did not commit."

Casado had worked at the Popeye's in the Ardsley rest stop on Interstate 87, where witnesses testified that Alturet-Rivera would frequently watch her for hours. One friend who also worked at the rest stop testified that, days before she was killed, Casado said she had told Alturet-Rivera their relationship was over and that she was in love with someone else.

The friend conceded Alturet-Rivera told Casado he was fine with that, but O'Connor called it "the tipping point" and that Casado had signed her death certificate with the pronouncement.

Alturet-Rivera faces a minimum of 15 years to life in prison and a maximum of 25 years to life. He was returned to the Westchester County jail to await sentencing, which acting state supreme Court Justice Robert Neary scheduled for July 8.

Alturet-Rivera left New York shortly after the killing and soon was living in his native Puerto Rico. In early 2018 he was dating a woman there and they had planned to take a vacation at the end of March. She disappeared but Alturet-Rivera went ahead with the vacation, where he used her credit card. Her body was discovered days later and he remains a suspect in her killing.

After she was killed he went to Missouri and then Washington state, where Yonkers police tracked him down in 2019.

Twitter: @jonbandler

This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Luis Alturet-Rivera convicted in 2017 Yonkers murder of Diana Casado