(Press Release) On Wednesday the Honorable Judge Brett Alldredge sentenced 22-year-old Marco Navarro of Kingsburg, to 34 years, 8 months to Life in state prison, the maximum sentence allowable by law.
On August 1, 2012 a Tulare County jury found Marco Navarro guilty of the First Degree Murder of 50-year-old Tony Jimenez. The jury further found the defendant guilty of threatening a witness with a knife and vehicle theft.
In 2007 Marco Navarro was living in a Fresno County group home and was placed in a Tulare County group home after an assault on a peace officer in Fresno County.
The murder took place in the late evening hours of June 24, 2007. Jimenez arrived at the group home to find that all five clients were still awake. He told them to go to bed, and all complied, except Navarro, who refused and began a profanity-laced, threatening assault on him. Navarro eventually went to his room and Jimenez proceeded to "write up" Navarro pursuant to the group home procedures. Sometime before midnight, Navarro attacked Jimenez with a knife. Navarro chased the victim outside and he died in the front yard of the group home. According to the autopsy report, Jimenez was stabbed 92 times.
Navarro then threatened a witness, one of the boys at the group home, by saying if he told what he saw, "The same thing is going to happen to you."
Navarro stole the keys to the group home van out of Jimenez' pants pocket as he lay on the front lawn and drove away. He fled to Mexico where he lived for four months before being apprehended while trying to cross the border back into the United States.
Navarro was originally convicted of first degree murder for this crime in 2008, but based upon an error in the presentation of the defendant's case, a new trial was ordered by the Court of Appeals.
The case was investigated by Sergeant Curtis Brown of the Visalia Police Department and prosecuted by Supervising Attorney Janet Wise with the assistance of Investigators Rose Denny and Tim Willmore of the Tulare County District Attorney's Office Bureau of Investigations.
TXT 24
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