Pharr man sentenced to 55 years for girlfriend's slaying

PHARR — Blanca Casas waited nearly four years for a day she doubted might ever come — the day her daughter’s killer would be sent to prison.

Nelly Casas’ boyfriend — Jose Luis Cantu — confessed to strangling the girl within weeks of Pharr police discovering her body on March 19, 2006, but fled to Mexico before he could be placed under arrest. He was arrested there on unrelated charges, incarcerated for nearly a year and then accidentally released before he could be returned to the U.S. to face justice.

After hearing the news, Blanca Casas never expected to see Cantu again.

But Tuesday, she watched as deputies escorted him from an Hidalgo County courtroom to begin a 55-year prison sentence for the crime.

“It’s all OK,” she said in Spanish shortly after the verdict was announced. “The jury decided the sentence. Justice has been done.”

U.S. authorities finally caught up with Cantu in December after the Mexican warden who mistakenly released him spotted him working as a security guard in a small village south of Ciudad Victoria, Tamps. He again confessed to Nelly Casas’ murder, was extradited, and took his case to trial last week.

In a surprising move, Cantu turned down a 40-year plea deal from prosecutors but then promptly pleaded guilty to the crime as soon as the jury was seated.

Jurors spent the next five days evaluating an appropriate sentence for the 3-year-old crime — a question that came down to how they interpreted his actions after the slaying.

The Pharr native told police and reporters on several occasions that he had strangled his girlfriend in a fit of passion after she told him she was ending their three-year relationship and leaving him for someone else.

But prosecutors painted that action as a capstone to years of emotional and physical abuse he inflicted on his 16-year-old girlfriend.

Cantu’s defense maintained, meanwhile, that the act was a completely uncharacteristic move by an impulsive and frightened 19-year-old and asked jurors to grant him probation.

“This case is not about an eye for an eye,” his attorney Carlos Garcia told jurors during his closing statements Tuesday. “This case is about forgiveness and with that an opportunity for redemption.”

Several members of Cantu’s family testified he was deeply in love with Nelly Casas and had planned on asking her to marry him — even going so far as to move to an oil rig job in Kansas the year before the murder to save up money for their life together.

But state’s witnesses — including several of Nelly Casas’ classmates at Hidalgo High School — described the couple’s relationship as an infatuation that bordered on obsessive.

Her best friend testified last week that Cantu often followed his girlfriend’s bus home from school just to keep an eye on with whom she spoke.

Her cousin told jurors the girl was afraid that if she broke up with him he might rape her and kill her.

“This is not a defendant who lost control,” said Andrew Almaguer, an Hidalgo County assistant district attorney. “This is a defendant who was losing control of her.”

But perhaps the most influential testimony in the jury’s ultimate decision came from Cantu’s best friend, whom he called moments after Nelly Casas’ death, Almaguer said.

Although Cantu had told nearly everyone he snapped when the girl broke off their relationship, Ray Gaona recalled a different story.

Cantu reportedly told him that he strangled his girlfriend inside her Pharr home until she passed out, then moved her to a shed behind the house, wrapped a cord around her neck and choked her some more until he was sure she had died, he told jurors.

“That gave him time to reflect that what he was doing was wrong,” Almaguer said Tuesday. “It took at least three minutes to strangle her to death. He had to look in her eyes that whole time.”

Blanca Casas fought back tears as prosecutors graphically recalled these last moments of her daughter’s life. But after more than three years of deferred justice, retelling that story was necessary to giving the Casas family the justice they had waited on for so long.

“There are consequences for murder,” Almaguer said. “There are consequences when a jury assesses punishment and sends a message to the community.”

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Jeremy Roebuck covers courts and general assignments for The Monitor. You can reach him at (956) 683-4437.