The caretaker of a Texas priest's home in Mexico has been sentenced to 37 years in prison for the reverend's murder, a judge said Thursday.
It was the highest sentence Manuel Martin Torres could receive for killing Rev. Jesse Euresti last month, said Judge Nancy Dominguez. Because Torres confessed to the crime, the judge was obligated to reduce by at least 1/4 the maximum 50 years he could have faced.
Torres, who is from Honduras, told police and reporters last month that he stabbed and attacked the priest with a machete after learning Euresti was kicking him out of the home in the Nuevo Laredo, across the border from Laredo, Texas.
Torres claimed he had been intimately involved with the Austin, Texas, priest for the past year, and he would visit him every Monday in Nuevo Laredo. He said Euresti met someone else shortly before he was killed.
Euresti's family has never responded to that allegation and could not be reached for comment Thursday.
Austin Bishop Gregory Aymond released a statement in response to the sentencing, urging forgiveness.
"As the people of God, we must forgive. We also pray for him, that his time in prison will be a time of spiritual conversion and that he will ask for and experience God's mercy," Aymond said.
Euresti vanished in early April after going to the Nuevo Laredo house he had bought in September to do some repair work. A neighbor called police after finding blood in the garage and his bedroom, said Euresti's niece, Beatrice Rios. His mattress and an area rug were missing.
Euresti's body was found about a week later off a highway in Nuevo Laredo after Torres allegedly called the reverend's family to demand 3,000 pesos, about $220, for information on its whereabouts.
Police said the family paid less than the demanded amount, and Torres was arrested when he tried to collect the money at a bank in the southern state of Chiapas.
Torres said he demanded money from Euresti's family after he was mugged while trying to cross the Guatemalan border.
Euresti, the pastor of Cristo Rey Catholic Church in south Austin, had been making weekly trips to work on the house before his scheduled retirement in July, according to Christian Gonzalez, spokesman for the Diocese of Austin. He planned to retire in Nuevo Laredo.
The priest, ordained in 1965, had worked as an Air Force chaplain and in bilingual parishes throughout Texas before returning to Cristo Rey, his childhood parish, in the final years of his career.
