Salinas, California
August 13th and 14th, 2018
Two lost days waiting for a jury to be impaneled. I retired as a Chief Deputy Warden from the California Department of Corrections. No defense attorney is going to let me be impaneled on a jury. It just won’t ever happen. It was a first degree murder trial so the jury pool was huge. The good news was that my number was so high that I almost surely would not be called. The bad news was I had to sit through two days of jury selection to get to the dismissal.
Having complained, I have to admit that it was a pretty interesting sit. As the case was briefly presented, it is alleged the accused, Victor Cabrara, strangled his girlfriend, Roshina Singh, for a $600,000 life insurance policy. He staged a robbery at his business and with an accomplice, staged the place and her death. The police immediately suspected him. He was released and immediately fled to Mexico. 8 years later he was caught.
Joe Szydlowski, Salinas CalifornianPublished 5:47 p.m. PT Aug. 30, 2018
(Photo: Provided/Marina Police Department)CONNECTTWEETLINKEDINCOMMENTEMAILMORE
A debt-ridden man who strangled his Marina girlfriend in 2008 for an insurance windfall, staged a robbery and then fled to Mexico is guilty of her murder, prosecutors reported Thursday afternoon.
A jury found Victor Cabrera, 41, guilty of murder with a special circumstance of killing for financial gain after a three-week trial, according to a press release from the Monterey County District Attorney’s Office.
After Cabrera killed his girlfriend, Roshni Singh, he tried to make it appear like a botched robbery and then, when police became suspicious, fled to Mexico, prosecutors said.
They said Cabrera strangled Singh because he was the beneficiary of her $600,000 life insurance policy, which would solve his deep financial debts.
After strangling her, he and his accomplice Francisco Agaton-Hernandez, drove her body in her SUV to Cabrera’s nearby car repair shop at about 5 a.m. to stage a robbery, prosecutors said.
There, Agaton-Hernandez tied up Cabrera and ransacked the shop to make it appear Cabrera had been robbed.
Agaton-Hernandez then drove the SUV with Singh’s body inside to a nearby apartment complex and abandoned it, prosecutors said.
After a half hour, Cabrera called 911 using his tongue and told dispatchers he’d been robbed by two men who had also kidnapped Singh.
Monterey police “were immediately suspicious and questioned Cabrera for more than five hours,” prosecutors said in the press release.
While they found holes in his story, they didn’t have enough evidence to arrest Cabrera, who returned to his parents’ home in Salinas, prosecutors said.
Then Cabrera, a U.S. citizen, fled to Mexico, where he stayed for eight years, prosecutors said.
But officers used his phone records to track down Agaton-Hernandez, who admitted to helping move Singh and staging the robbery, prosecutors said. He was convicted of aiding and abetting murder at a 2011 trial and is serving a life sentence.
In 2016, DA investigators and the FBI tracked down Cabrera, who was arrested in Mexico and then extradited, prosecutors said.
He is scheduled to be sentenced Sept. 27, according to Monterey County Superior Court online records. CONNECTTWEETLINKEDINCOMMENTEMAILMORE
He was sentenced to Life without the possibility of parole on September 27th, 2018. I can’t imagine the argument that anyone could make that would make me think he was innocent of this crime. His accomplice confessed to the whole thing.