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Adrienne Shelly's Killer Sentenced to 25 Years

The construction worker who killed actress-director Adrienne Shelly in her West Village office was sentenced to 25 years in prison yesterday. Diego Pillco, an illegal immigrant from Ecuador, pleaded guilty last month, and yesterday, he faced her family's sadness and rage.

Shelly's mother Elaine Langbaum mentioned her young granddaughter Sophie, "The baby [Shelly] wanted for so long will never know her mother. "She will never hold her mother's hand, kiss her mother's face or feel her mother's hug." And Shelly's husband Andrew Ostroy railed against Pillco:

"You stalked and brutally attacked my wife, silenced her screams with your hand until you rendered her unconscious and then, in a brutal and gruesome act of cowardice, took a bedsheet and strangled her to death. You tied her up and hung her the way you strung up pigs back in Ecuador...

...You deserve no mercy. I want you to rot in that cell...For the last 499 days, I have been consumed by unfathomable grief. I will spend the rest of my days hating you with every fiber of my being for what you have done...

No sentence would be enough for you."

Pillco had said, "I came with the purpose to do work, and to help my family out...I have suffered because I know what I have done. If there were a death penalty, I would take it. All I want to say is I know they're not going to forgive me. This is what I deserve." He will be deported when he completes the 25-year sentence.

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Comments [rss]

  • hugomania

    a woman left dead, a child left motherless, a family left devastated, hopes for a new life in the US obliterated all for noise the street. shameful.

  • bornbrednewyorker

    Will we ever use the death penalty in this state?

  • Polite New Yorker

    What also bothers me is that all three of the leading candidates for president all favor an illegal alien amnesty program, ensuring many more Pillcos for years to come.

  • zodak

    i agree donner, i hate having to pay for these killers to hang around & lift weights in prison.

  • donner

    So my tax dollars are going to help keep this guy in the country for then next 25 years? He should be deported now and made to rot in an Ecuadorian prison...

  • burgeon

    I hope his cellmate "has a bad day."

  • he'll be dead in before that.

  • JacqueMehoff

    oh well. you win some, you lose some.

  • Rocknrope

    Scumbag got off easy.

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