A Texas man was sentenced to life in prison without parole in Colorado last week for murdering his girlfriend after she tried to break off their relationship, court officials said.
Following a multi-week trial that started in October, an Adams County jury found 33-year-old Ricardo Perales-Cordero guilty of murder after less than two hours of deliberation, officials from the 17th Judicial District Attorney’s Office said in a news release.
Perales-Cordero was sentenced on Tuesday, Nov. 5, to life in prison without parole for the 2022 murder of his ex-girlfriend in Brighton by Adams County District Court Judge Jeffrey Dean Ruff, according to court records.
The victim met Perales-Cordero, who lived in Texas, online in March 2022 and the pair dated for roughly seven months before she attempted to break off the relationship in October 2022, prosecutors said in the news release.
A few days after the attempted breakup, Perales-Cordero traveled to Brighton from Houston, Texas, and met the woman at a Quality Inn, prosecutors said.
Employees at the hotel heard an argument and two gunshots before they saw Perales-Cordero leave the hotel and take off in his car, according to the District Attorney’s Office. When employees entered the hotel room shortly after, they found the victim dead on the bed with a gunshot wound to her head.
Perales-Cordero was later arrested in Trinidad and admitted to shooting the victim, but he told police he did so as part of a suicide pact since the two couldn’t be together.
“This defendant, rather than let the victim return to her children, murdered her in cold blood in a Brighton hotel,” District Attorney Brian Mason said in the release. “It is heartbreaking to see another incident of domestic violence take the life of a mother, who now leaves behind her children and family.”
