Kearney, NJ: Kearny man admits strangling girlfriend with curling iron cord

By Ken Thorbourne/The Jersey Journal
April 22, 2010, 6:17PM

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KEARNY -- A town man faces up to 26 years in prison after having pleading guilty to strangling his girlfriend with a curling iron cord during an argument in his apartment in 2008, officials said.
"This is a fair resolution for a brutal and senseless act," Hudson County Assistant Prosecutor Kelly Simpson said yesterday of the plea to aggravated manslaughter by Diego Leonardo Campoverde-Cabrera, 28, in the death of Andrea Catalina Reinoso-Bueno in his apartment at 9-11 Windsor St.
Simpson said relatives of the victim are expected to come from her native Ecuador to speak at Campoverde-Cabrera's sentencing on June 4. The guilty plea was entered on April 16.
Responding to a 911 call at the Windsor Street apartment on Nov. 16, 2008, police said Campoverde-Cabrera answered the door and inside cops found the victim's partially clothed body.
Reinoso-Bueno had a ligature mark below her jaw line indicating she had been strangled to death with the electric cord, Simpson said, adding that she also had blunt force trauma to her head and had been stabbed twice in the torso with the metal-tipped curling iron.
Reinoso-Bueno had just returned to her boyfriend's apartment after spending a week in Greenwich, Conn., where she worked as a nanny, officials said. The family she worked for in Greenwich helped identified her body, authorities said.
Simpson said the lethal attack appears to have started as "an argument that escalated and we don't know the reason." Bail was set at $500,000 for Campoverde-Cabrera and he has been in jail since his arrest.
Campoverde-Cabrera will be sentenced by Hudson County Superior Court Judge Paul DePascale in the Hudson County Administration Building on Newark Avenue in Jersey City. He will have to serve 85 percent of any sentence before becoming eligible for parole.