A Las Vegas teen has been jailed for up to 40 years for a savage attack on his teacher where he raped and strangled her before trying to slash her wrists.
Jonathan Martinez-Garcia, 17, smirked at his sentencing Wednesday as the court heard in harrowing detail how he ambushed the teacher by asking if he could speak about his grades after class at El Dorado High School in April 2022.
Martinez-Garcia waited until her back was turned before trying to choke her with a ‘rope or string’.
He then slammed the young woman’s head against a table, knocking her unconscious.
When the victim awoke, her pants and underwear had been pulled down.
Martinez-Garcia poured something over her saying he was going to set her on fire and then pushed a bookshelf onto the woman which he then sat on.
The victim, who identified herself only as Sade, told the judge that she believed she was going to die during the horrific ordeal which left her covered in bruises.
Sade told the sentencing hearing, she has been ‘imprisoned’ mentally and physically.
‘It only makes sense that he too should be in prison for as long as possible,’ she said, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported.
Martinez-Garcia was sentenced at Vegas’ Regional Justice Center after pleading guilty to attempted murder, attempted sexual assault, and battery with use of a deadly weapon resulting in substantial bodily harm that left his victim with trauma and multiple injuries.
Clark County District Court Judge Kathleen Delaney, sentenced Martinez-Garcia to a minimum of 16 years behind bars, rising to a maximum term of 40 years, the Associated Press reported.
Prosecutors asked the judge that for a minimum of 22 to 55 years behind bars. But in her sentencing, Judge Delaney said she was ‘balancing the seriousness of the crime with other factors’.
The brutal attack occurred after Martinez-Garcia went to his teacher’s classroom after school hours to discuss his grades.
Police said he locked the classroom door before he viciously beat her.
The teacher told cops she asked Martinez-Garcia why he was assaulting her, and he responded that he ‘didn’t like teachers’ and was ‘getting revenge.’
During the attack, Martinez-Garcia attempted to slit the teacher’s wrists and told her, ‘Can’t you die already?’
He initially told cops he ‘blacked out’ and didn’t remember the attack, but later admitted he remembered trying to choke her and conceded he had raped her.
Sade recounted: ‘He beat my body so badly that I couldn’t fight.
‘One of the times I woke, I found myself trapped under heavy shelves that he toppled over me to where my breathing was suppressed, and I was being crushed to near death,’ she recalled.
‘I truly believed with everything in me that I was going to die right there under those shelves.’
Sade’s mother told the judge that her daughter used to be a gregarious woman who came from a family of educators and had moved to Vegas to begin her first teaching job.
But since the attack she has had difficulty leaving her home because of ongoing physical and mental health complications.
‘For the rest of her life, her last memory of teaching is going to be this student, trying to kill her,’ Sade’s mother told the judge.
Prosecutors said that the teacher remembers Martinez-Garcia saying repeatedly: ‘Why won’t you die?’
Sade told the judge that she did not return to her teaching job after the attack because she felt mentally and physically ‘imprisoned.’
Martinez-Garcia fled after the attack and took the teacher’s keys.
The instructor was later found by a school employee who called 911.
The teen was arrested shortly after by school police while he was on his way to an award ceremony at the school.
The Judge rebuked Martinez-Garcia Wednesday, telling him that such an attack on a teacher was totally unacceptable.
