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TACOMA, Wash. — Jurors found a Tacoma man guilty of second-degree murder Thursday for the death of his 77-year-old mother, who was attacked in the face with a broken whiskey bottle and strangled last year in the Stadium District apartment they shared.
Click here for more background information on the case.
Sebastian Levy-Aldrete, 50, argued at trial that an intruder killed his mother, Maria Aldrete-Levy, Oct. 16, 2017.
Pierce County prosecutors argued that he did it after spending half of $20,000 his mother had given him to hold as a deposit for a house they planned to buy.
They were supposed to sign the closing papers the day she was killed.
Prosecutors also charged Levy-Aldrete with premeditated first-degree murder, but after deliberating since Friday, jurors weren’t able to come to a verdict on that count.
Levy-Aldrete is scheduled to be sentenced next month for the second-degree murder conviction.
He told investigators he struggled with and chased his mother's killer, but prosecutors argued the evidence didn't support that.
There weren’t signs of such a struggle or a break-in, they said.
Levy-Aldrete argued at trial that it didn’t make sense that he would kill his mother before they closed on the new house and that there had been break-ins at the apartment building before.
He also argued that he and his mother were very close, that she’d been giving him money for years and that it didn’t make sense that she’d be so upset about the finances that he’d kill her.
Click here to read the full story on the Tacoma News Tribune.
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Tacoma News Tribune
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