Friday, February 5, 2010

Waldwick, NJ: Waldwick mans pleads guilty to beating, setting wife on fire

Friday, February 5, 2010
LAST UPDATED: FRIDAY FEBRUARY 5, 2010, 6:57 PM
BY KIBRET MARKOS
THE RECORD
STAFF WRITER

A Waldwick man admitted Friday that he beat and strangled his ex-wife before he set her on fire during a domestic dispute.

Attorney Robert Kalisch comforted Ovidio Palacios Rojaswhen he started to cry.
Ovidio Palacios Rojas, 54, then waved goodbye to his sons in Superior Court in Hackensack, slammed his head hard against a wall and burst into sobs as he was led out of the courtroom.

“How can I explain it to you? I was crazy that day. I was out of my head,” he said earlier when asked about what happened on June 10, 2008.

Family members said at the time that Rojas and Maria Rivas had been married for 24 years before they divorced in 2006. Rojas wanted to get back together, they said, but Rivas was moving on.

Prosecutors said the two began arguing over Rivas’ plan to move to El Salvador. Rojas then struck Rivas several times and strangled her, and then poured gasoline around her and set her ablaze. His two sons subdued him until police arrived and arrested him, prosecutors said.

Rivas was badly burned when police and emergency workers found her in a second-floor bedroom at their East Prospect Street home.

Rojas told detectives shortly after his arrest that Rivas attacked him with a knife. He said he grabbed her by the throat for over a minute to defend himself, even after she had dropped the knife. He said he then tried to set himself on fire.

Police, however, said Rojas suffered only minor burns to his ears and hands while Rivas’ entire body was burned – discounting the claim that Rojas was the target of the arson.

Still, Rojas said Friday that his intention was to burn himself when he started the fire but that Rivas’ bed caught on fire, too.

“Did you not attempt to burn yourself, the room and everything in the house?” his attorney, Robert Kalisch, asked Rojas.

“I put gasoline on myself,” Rojas replied, speaking through a translator. “I wanted to hurt myself.”

Assistant Bergen County Prosecutor Ralph Lilore then asked Rojas, “By repeatedly striking and beating your wife, you killed your wife, right?”

Rojas said at first that he did not remember attacking or strangling Rivas. But he admitted that he was the only person in the bedroom with Rivas and acknowledged an autopsy report which concluded that Rivas died from a severe beating and strangulation.

Later on, he burst into tears and said, “That wasn’t my intention. I was crazy that day. I didn’t want to do that.”

Looking severely subdued, Rojas struggled to answer questions from Kalisch, Lilore and Judge Harry G. Carroll. The Spanish translator often leaned very close to his lips to hear what he was saying as he spoke in a near-whisper.

In the end, he admitted that he killed his wife by grabbing her throat. He pleaded guilty to aggravated manslaughter and aggravated arson, and will receive 25 to 30 years when he is sentenced March 12.

Rojas must serve at least 85 percent of his sentence before parole, and faces deportation to his native El Salvador at the end of his sentence.

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