Carmelo Mendoza pleaded guilty to fatally stabbing his wife Yaquelin Collado (45) during an argument while the woman’s daughter watched helplessly in their apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens (NYC).
Mendoza (44) is expected to be sentenced to 18 years to life in prison for the crime committed on July 3, 2020, at 34th Road, said Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz. Collado, a beauty salon owner in Elmhurst, was stabbed more than 27 times in the chest, neck, and torso.
The couple was fighting that morning when Collado’s 19-year-old daughter tried to intervene and repeatedly saw Mendoza stab her mother in the chest, neck, and torso. The teenager threw several objects at him and pushed him. Still, the prosecutor said Mendoza continued stabbing Collado until the wounded mother told her daughter to leave to save her life.
Collado’s daughter knocked on neighbors’ doors asking for help and then called her boyfriend and the police. Authorities found Mendoza lying on top of Collado, bleeding on the floor, with a kitchen knife nearby. The attacker had stabbed himself several times in the abdomen but survived, the Queens Chronicle recalled.
In a similar case, in February, Cesar Santana was accused of killing his ex-partner Luz Hernandez, a Dominican kindergarten teacher in Jersey City whose body was found in a shallow grave in Kearny (NJ).
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Days earlier, Dominican brothers Gualberto and Gilberto Lebron were convicted in connection with the death of Julia Vega, a daycare worker whose body was found in trash bags behind an abandoned house in New Jersey in 2018.
In July 2022, Raul Jose Santos was arrested after NYPD found his Dominican wife stabbed in their home in The Bronx.
In September 2020, a Quisqueyana Uber driver was stabbed to death by her husband in Queens (NYC). The same fatal fate befell in that county in August 2019. Dominican Carmen Iris Santiago was also attacked by her ex-convict husband, from whom she was separated, in the nail salon where she worked.
All charges are mere accusations, and the persons prosecuted are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
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