FORT LAUDERDALE — Jorge Ayala Villamizar was convicted Wednesday of the 2004 murder of his live-in girlfriend, Bianca Sierra, in Pompano Beach.
Jurors deliberated for less than 90 minutes before returning the guilty verdict, which was read at 6:25 p.m.
Sentencing was set for Dec. 14.
During closing arguments earlier in the afternoon, prosecutor Tom Coleman grabbed the murder weapon and brought it down hard against a podium in front of Broward Circuit Judge Andrew Siegel. "There is no more criminal act than taking a four-pound sledgehammer and smashing it down on someone's head," he said, the loud bang punctuating his statement. "And then doing it again," he added, bringing the hammer down on the railing in front of the jury.
AdvertisementSierra, 25, was killed on Nov. 3, 2004, at her home in Pompano Beach. Her body was found facedown, her hands under a pillow on the bed she shared with the man now accused of murdering her.
Defense lawyers Jose Reyes and George Reres urged the jury to consider an alternate theory — that Ayala-Villamizar, now 39, left Sierra's home because they had broken up, and he was not aware of her death until he was arrested for it five years later.
"No one knows exactly what happened except for the person who killed her," said Reres, "and that person is not in this courtroom."
Prosecutors said Ayala-Villamizar, the last person known to have seen the victim alive, killed her with the sledgehammer and took her car, which was later found in Jacksonville. Ayala-Villamizar was found in 2009 in Brownsville, Texas, after the Sierra murder was featured on "America's Most Wanted."
The defendant maintained his innocence, and his lawyers suggested the victim's involvement in the practice of Santeria led to her murder at someone else's hands. Coleman scoffed at the idea, first raised by a defense lawyer, that Ayala-Villamizar would have been a victim too if he had been there when Sierra was killed.
"Folks, he was there when she was killed," Coleman said.
Sierra's daughter, 9 years old at the time, discovered the body and ran to a neighbor for help. Investigators testified during the trial that they found the sledgehammer, which belonged to the suspect, with his tools in a hallway closet.
Reyes said his client would not have left the bloodied sledgehammer behind, where it could be easily found, had he used it to commit a brutal murder.
But prosecutor Peter Holden told jurors that's exactly what Ayala-Villamizar did – after cleaning the weapon so that most of the blood was gone.
Holden said the position of the victim's body, which showed no signs of fighting back, indicates she was asleep when the killer struck. "That's the rage part," he said. "That's the part that makes it personal."
Ayala-Villamizar faces life in prison.
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