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WILKES-BARRE — The fate of a Hazleton man who prosecutors say ended his ex-girlfriend’s life with his bare hands is now in the hands of a county judge.
Luzerne County President Judge Richard M. Hughes III began deliberating a verdict just before 5 p.m. Thursday after both sides in the suspect’s three-day bench trial rested their cases. The judge said he will likely issue a verdict Friday at the Luzerne County Courthouse.
Hughes, in the meantime, will mull whether to find Oscar Lozano Garcia guilty of first-degree murder, a charge prosecutors contend fits the nature of the alleged crime, or side with defense attorneys and convict Lozano Garcia of voluntary manslaughter.
Prosecutors say Lozano Garcia, 38, strangled Maria Brea, 32, and stowed her bound, plastic-wrapped body in the attic of her 343 E. Diamond Ave. apartment in Hazleton on Dec. 14, 2012.
The mother of two’s body was found four days later, while Lozano Garcia eluded authorities for more than a year before U.S. Marshals nabbed him in Mexico.
Assistant District Attorney Daniel Zola said the evidence presented throughout the trial points to a specific intent to kill.
Experts testified that Lozano Garcia’s fingerprints, Zola said in his closings, were littered along pieces of tape that bound both Brea’s dead body and the frame of the padlocked attic door that guarded her corpse.
Zola noted the handful of Daron Northeast employees who detailed Lozano Garcia’s scratch-laden skin and references their former co-worker made to a fight, after he showed up at the Archbald masonry company in a panicked state and abruptly quit on the day Brea disappeared.
One of those former co-workers, Juan Cervantes, testified he took $600 from Lozano Garcia and drove him to Mexico the next day.
But perhaps the most damning factor was the manner in which Brea was killed, Zola said.
“Manual strangulation by its very nature, by blocking a person’s ability to breathe and from making noise, prevents them from crying out for help,” he said. “It’s a way of silencing your victim while you’re carrying out the act of homicide.”
All signs, Zola said, pointed to first-degree murder.
“He doesn’t flee to another city, he doesn’t flee to another county or another state, he flees to an entire other country thousands of miles from where he committed the act of criminal homicide,” Zola said. “We’ve proven the defendant did, in fact, kill Maria Brea and we proved he did it with the use of his own hands.”
Lozano Garcia’s court-appointed defense attorneys, public defenders John R. Sobota and Mark A. Singer, pushed for a voluntary manslaughter conviction, arguing Lozano Garcia killed Brea in a fit of passion after their relationship came to an end.
“This is situation in which there was a fight, and this was a quick fight,” Singer said in his closings. “It wasn’t something that was premeditated.”
Singer said prosecutors spun a tale of “love and hate” and painted Lozano Garcia as someone to fear. Conversely, Singer argued, the couple lived together as man and wife and at one point loved one another.
“There’s been testimony as to how bad Oscar was,” Singer said. “But she continued to stay with him.”