A San Antonio man has been sentenced to 12 years in prison for paying a man $10,000 to kill his ex-girlfriend and “rip her eyes out” because she refused to let him see his son.
Authorities foiled the plot and charged Teodoro Torres III with three counts of solicitation of capital murder-remuneration, a first-degree felony. In February, a Bexar County jury found him guilty on all counts. He faced a sentence of five to 99 years in prison.
On Friday, Visiting Judge Kevin O’Connell sentenced Torres, 54, to 12 years. He will have to serve half his sentence before becoming eligible for parole.
Torres was arrested Dec. 9, 2019, and accused of contacting a man he had met in the Bexar County jail five days earlier and asking him to kill his ex-girlfriend, court records show.
Torres told the man, Freddy Saiz, that his ex-girlfriend would not allow him to see his then-5-year-old son.
Saiz later told investigators he that he accepted the money and began to spend it, but later had “cold feet” and decided not to go through with the killing, according to an arrest affidavit. Saiz contacted Torres’ ex-girlfriend and told her about the murder-for-hire plot.
Texas Rangers met with Saiz, and he told them about the scheme. They had him contact Torres by phone, and Torres repeated his desire to have his girlfriend killed, the affidavit said.
Rangers sent an undercover agent to meet with Torres. At a Bill Miller Bar-B-Q restaurant, Torres told the agent he wanted him “to rip her eyes out and he wanted (her) dead as well as her boyfriend,” according to the affidavit. Torres provided the agent with a picture of the woman and information about where she could be found.
Once under arrest, Torres told authorities he was angry at his ex-girlfriend because she would not let him see his son, and that when he wrote the boy letters, her new boyfriend would return them to him with expletives scrawled on the envelopes.
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