Adones Betances was convicted last month of first-degree murder in the death of Winston Ortiz, 18, who had been dating the killer’s sister.
Prosecutors said Betances, 26, stabbed the teenager three times in the torso before dousing him with gasoline and setting him ablaze in the hallway of a Highbridge apartment building.
Neighbors smelled fire and heard Ortiz scream, police previously said.
Bodycam video captured Ortiz naming Betances as his killer in the moments before he died on Aug. 12, 2020.
“Winston Ortiz was killed in a torturous manner; stabbed and then set afire while he was still alive, because the defendant was upset that his sister and Winston had had a relationship,” said Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark. “He will be remembered as a caring, family oriented young man and it’s unfathomable to think he was killed in such a horrific way.”
In a courtroom filled with Ortiz’s family and friends, his mother Joan Tamarez spoke of the pain she still felt over her son’s horrible death.
“I still close my eyes and open them hoping this is all a nightmare,” Tamarez said.
She said her father-in-law died a week after Ortiz and her own mother suffered a stroke a short time later.
“This trauma has made us suffer, sick in grief and horror,” she said.
Tamarez was so overcome with emotion that she could not finish her statement. A grief counselor picked up where she left off.
“The defendant is a coward,” the counselor said, reading the statement on Tamarez’s behalf. “I can hear Winston crying out when I lay awake at night.”
She said Ortiz was active at his church and had survived a brain aneurysm.
Ortiz’s father, who is also named Winston, said the murder had “broken us into different pieces and we’re trying to put these pieces back together.”
He said no member of Betances’s family had apologized in the years since the murder, least of all Betances himself. Betances refused to enter the courtroom during the sentencing.
“We can’t have people like that in the street,” the father said.
Ortiz had been dating Betances’ younger sister, who was 14 when she met him at church, authorities said.
Ortiz’s family said the couple had broken up in the days before he was killed.
Judge Jeanette Rodriguez-Morick said the murder was “was carefully thought out and planned.
“So when Adones says he’s innocent,” she said, “it rings hollow and shows a continuing lack of any remorse.”