Suspect told police ex-girlfriend coerced him to kill couple in 2018
Jilson Duban Avelar-rodriguez admitted to a San Antonio police detective that he killed a couple, shooting them as they slept, because his ex-girlfriend told him to and threatened him if he didn’t, the detective testified Thursday.
The confession came about an hour into an interview conducted by Mark Duke, now a retired San Antonio Police Department homicide detective, which was played on a video screen for the jury in the capital murder trial of Avelar-rodriguez, 25.
Julia Chase Wright, 21, and Nicholas Andrew “Trey” Milanovich, 23, were shot in 2018 at their apartment in the Medical Center area. Authorities believe the motive may have been drugrelated.
Wright, who had been shot in the face, managed to run from the apartment and knock on doors seeking help before she collapsed and died on the sidewalk. Crime scene photos showed a blood pool and trail from where she fell leading back to her apartment.
Milanovich was shot above his right eyebrow and never left the bed. He died at University Hospital.
Avelar-rodriguez faces life in prison without the possibility of parole if convicted. The Bexar County District Attorney’s Office is not seeking the death penalty.
Duke interrogated Avelar-rodriguez, whom he had identified as the prime suspect, about a year after the killings.
“Why did you do it?” he asked, the conversation translated by Homeland Security Agent Joe Ibarra at an immigration facility in Pearsall where Avelar-rodriguez, a Honduran, had been detained on an unrelated charge.
“Melissa (Cortez) said she wanted me to do something to these people,” Avelar-rodriguez told Duke. “(She said) ‘You do it or I’m going to send people to do something to you.’”
Avelar-rodriguez said Cortez sent him to the apartment to steal a box containing drugs, but he “messed up” and took the wrong one.
Before that, Avelar-rodriguez had spent about an hour and a half deflecting questions from Duke. But when the detective began showing him key evidence he had collected in the case, the suspect relented.
“I felt threatened because she sold drugs and sold to a lot of people,” he said of his ex-girlfriend.
When pressed about the threats, Avelar-rodriguez told Duke that Cortez’s ex-husband was in the Mexican Mafia, a notorious prison gang, and she had “connections with the cartels through her ex.”
He said Cortez told him the night before the killings that he had three days to do it or she would send someone after him.
Cortez testified briefly on Wednesday, stating that after the killings, Avelar-rodriguez went to her home, took a shower, and threw the clothes he was wearing into a trash bag.
She also said he brought a silver lockbox that had a medicine bottle in it. They later realized the container was assigned to Wright from the methadone clinic where she was being treated for a heroin addiction, Cortez said.
Cortez told the jury that, shortly after the killing, she gave her attorney the bag of clothes Avelar-rodriguez had been wearing. Then her testimony was halted when she asked for her lawyer. Cortez has not been charged in the case.