COLORADO SPRINGS — A tearful Salvator Esquivel-Castillo testified Monday that he wanted to kill himself by driving a car off a cliff with the body of his girlfriend in the vehicle shortly after she died of a drug overdose.
Instead he dragged Jaclyn Funderburg’s body to the edge of the cliff intended to jump with her body but at last second simply let her go.
“What I wanted to do was just go off the cliff and end it all myself,” the 37-year-old restaurant worker told the jurors through a translator.
“I really didn’t know what to think,” he said sobbing. “I took her to the edge of the cliff. I thought I would jump with her. I closed my eyes and let her go.”
Esquivel-Castillo is on trial for first-degree murder in the death of Funderburg, whose body was discovered on July 22, 2007, buried beneath a large rock at the base of a cliff.
An anonymous tipster led searchers to the site. By then, the 22-year-old Colorado Springs woman had been missing for 11 days.
Police arrested Esquivel-Castillo shortly after her disappearance on an assault charge stemming from an incident in which he broke her jaw so severely that it had to be wired shut. The estranged couple had a son born 10 months before Funderburg’s death.
Monday, as the trial entered its fourth week, Esquivel-Castillo took the witness stand for the first time.
Read what Esquivel-Castillo said Monday in court at .
