Illegal Immigrant Who Murdered Elderly Woman With Fire Extinguisher Gets 22 Years in Jail

Esdras Marroquin Gomez has been sentenced to life behind bars for the brutal 2015 murder of Lois Colley. NYPD

An illegal immigrant who bludgeoned an 83-year-old woman to death with a fire extinguisher has been sentenced to 22 years behind bars.

Esdras Marroquin Gomez of Guatemala pleaded guilty in May to the 2015 murder of Lois Colley, the wife of a millionaire McDonald’s franchise owner, Fox News reports.

Marroquin Gomez, now 34, had worked on the Colleys’ 300-acre estate in North Salem, New York, about five times but was not employed there at the time of the murder, Fox News reported. He went to the Colley’s home to ask for compensation for a chainsaw injury he sustained on the property that he said made it difficult for him to find work, and for a flight to Guatemala.

Marroquin Gomez asked to see Eugene Colley, the victim’s husband, but he was not there. The 83-year-old woman then offered him cab fare to go to her husband’s office in Croton Falls, according to court testimony. Marroquin Gomez then bludgeoned the elderly woman’s face with a fire extinguisher in the home, killing her. She was found in a pool of blood in the home’s laundry room.

Assistant District Attorney Julia Cornachio said the attack was exceedingly violent.

“This defendant bashed her face in. The callousness and evil that that required...is incomprehensible,” Cornachio said, according to the Westchester Journal News.

The fire extinguisher was found in a nearby pond with blood matching that of Colley’s. Marroquin Gomez flew to Guatemala on Nov. 14, 2015—four days after the murder. He was eventually found in Mexico and taken to Westchester County, according to the District Attorney’s Office.

At the June 14 sentencing, Marroquin Gomez read a letter aloud asking for forgiveness from God “for having taken the life of a human being and doing horrible damage to the Colley family,” the Westchester Journal News reports.

In a letter read out in court, Eugene asked that Marroquin Gomez receive the maximum possible punishment for his wife’s brutal murder.

In the letter, Eugene described his 65-year-long marriage with his wife. He wrote that he had seen many horrors during his time in World War II, but nothing like the pain he felt on the day his wife, whom he called “honey” and “love of my life”, was viciously murdered.

“I am now 91 years old, despite the many horrors I witnessed as a young man and at war, the most painful and horrible thing in my life was to get that call on the way home from work on November 2015, that Lois was hurt and laying on the floor,” the letter read.

“I rushed home and saw her lying there in a pool of blood. I immediately started CPR from my Naval training. In the meantime yelling to try and get help. The blood puddle kept enlarging and I realized that the love of my life wasn’t going to come back. I realised to leave her side and kept hoping and praying that by some miracle she would come back to us.”

One of the Colley’s sons, Bryan Colley, called his mother’s murder a “vicious and brutal” killing that was the “definition of evil” in court, Westchester Journal News reported.

His daughter, Christine Colley, told the judge about her grandmother as well as how the murder had impacted her. “I’m sad, I’m angry, and I’m terrified,” she said.

Westchester County Court Judge George Fufidio handed down a sentence that was at the upper range of the punishment the prosecution had called for, noting that Gomez had “brutally and savagely” beaten Colley to death.

Marroquin Gomez will spend 22 years in prison.