Ex-beau: "I didn't mean to do it"
Valerie’s ‘killer’ sobs from jail
The Queens man charged with killing his ex and dumping her body in Greenwich, Conn., bawled uncontrollably during a jailhouse interview Saturday, repeatedly apologizing and insisting he tried to revive her — before he “put her in the suitcase and ran.”
“I didn’t know what to do,” insisted Javier Da Silva Rojas, 24, during a 45-minute interview in Westchester County Jail, during which he uttered the word “sorry” more than two dozen times.
“I don’t know what happened. I didn’t mean to do it.
“I’m a bad person,” he told The Post.
Police say Rojas viciously killed Valerie Reyes, 24, put duct tape over her mouth, tied her limbs with twine, stuffed her body in a suitcase and dumped the luggage like trash on Glenville Road in ritzy Greenwich.
The New Rochelle woman’s body was discovered on Feb. 5, and Rojas was busted this past Monday after he tried to use Reyes’ ATM card to withdraw $1,000 from her bank account on Jan. 30.
Rojas, wearing an orange jumpsuit with a white T-shirt underneath, avoided eye contact as he sat with his hands tightly clasped on a white table. His greasy brown hair hung limply down to his chin, which quivered throughout.
When asked how she died, Rojas replied, “She fell. We fell together.” He nodded when asked if she fell off the bed.
That account echoes the statements Reyes previously made to detectives — that Reyes fell on the floor and cracked her head open during a rough sex romp in her New Rochelle apartment on Jan. 29.
“She wasn’t responding. I went and put my mouth on her mouth. I tried to put air in,” he said through tears, shaking so hard that he couldn’t speak.
Asked if Reyes was bleeding, he could only whimper.
“I’m a bad person,” he said. “I did something wrong. I didn’t call the police” because, he said, “I thought they would blame me.”
He bound her body, he said, because “she didn’t fit in the suitcase.” Then he drove, randomly, to Connecticut in a rented car.
“I drove. I didn’t know where I was going,” he said.
Then he drove back to Queens and waited.
He nodded when asked if he knew cops would find him — and even claimed he withdrew cash from Reyes’ account because he wanted “to get caught.”
He claimed that “everything was good” in his relationship with Reyes, whom he met online. His favorite thing about her, he said, was that “she smelled good.”
Yet he couldn’t remember how long they dated. “We didn’t have an anniversary.”
Rojas, who holds dual citizenship in Venezuela and Portugal, entered the US on the Visa Waiver Program — which allows visitors “for tourism or business” to stay for 90 days or less without a visa — on May 8, 2017, according to sources. ICE this past Wednesday placed a detainer on Rojas.
He offered one last apology — to the grieving Reyes family who are demanding justice. “I’m sorry for the pain.”