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A Texas man has been sentenced to 40 years behind bars for strangling his pregnant sister to death in 2019 because he believed she was an “embarrassment” to the family.
Eduardo Arevalo, who was 19 at the time of his sister’s murder, was handed the sentence on June 9 after pleading guilty to a felony murder charge, court records show.
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Arevalo originally faced a more serious capital murder charge after detectives in The Colony, a suburb of Dallas, Texas, arrested the man in 2019, when he confessed to killing his 23-year-old sister, Viridiana Arevalo, according to NBC5 DFW.
Viridiana was reported missing from her family’s home on December 17, 2019, the local news outlet reported. Her body was found five days later in an alley on Strickland Ave. in The Colony.
Family members initially believed that the 23-year-old left home wanting to harm herself, and was possibly suicidal. They informed officials about a note they found, which detailed her decision to end her life, KDFW reported.
Police said that when Arevalo confessed to strangling his sister to death on December 16, 2019 as she sat on the couch, he also admitted to forging the note himself to make her murder look like a suicide.
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According to an arrest affidavit obtained by KXAS, Arevalo thought, “Maybe it’s the time to murder her,” after getting into an argument with his sister, which prompted him to wrap his arm around her neck.
He admitted to detectives that after strangling his sister, he then wrapped her head in duct tape, put her body in the trunk of his car and dumped it in a remote area of Fannin County, about an hour away from The Colony. He later went back to the dump site, retrieved his sister’s body and then dumped her in the alley about a mile away from their family’s home.
Arevalo told police that his sister’s pregnancy was an embarrassment to their family and that she would not be a good mother.
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“The only reason he gave for killing her was that she was an embarrassment to her family, and he stated it would be better off that she wasn’t here,” Sgt. Aaron Woodard, public information officer with The Colony Police Department, told ABC 13.
At the time of the murder, Arevalo’s brother, Diego Arevalo, believed his brother was not capable of committing such an act against his sister.
“I know my brother, he wouldn’t do something like this. He’s very kind, very positive kind of guy, very motivated. He helped my family out, he helped my brothers, he even helped my sister out,” Diego told ABC 13 in 2019.
