Jonathan Eluterio Martinez Garcia enters the courtroom for sentencing at the Regional Justice Center in Las Vegas Wednesday, June 28, 2023. Martinez Garcia pled guilty to attempted murder and other charges in April in connection with an attack on his teacher at Eldorado High School in 2022.
Wednesday, June 28, 2023 | 5:44 p.m.
The Las Vegas teenager who admitted he tried to kill his teacher in her Las Vegas classroom last spring was sentenced to 16 to 40 years in prison Wednesday in Clark County District Court.
Jonathan Eluterio Martinez Garcia was 16 when he came to one of his teachers at Eldorado High School after classes in April 2022, ostensibly to ask her about missing assignments. Instead, he strangled her from behind with a cord.
The attack got more brutal from there.
“I have been in prison by him twice now,” the victim said during Wednesday’s lengthy sentencing hearing at the Regional Justice Center. “The first time was during the actual attack. He held me hostage in my own classroom. I lost consciousness at his hands numerous times. He would beat me until my body just couldn’t take it again and again. I just thought there was no way I was making it out of that classroom alive.
“The second imprisonment has been every day since,” she continued. “My body and mind feel as though they’re no longer my own.”
The Sun is not naming the teacher because she is the victim of a sexual assault.
Her family told District Judge Kathleen Delaney that the young woman, still in her 20s, now suffers from chronic physical pain and post-traumatic stress disorder. She uses a walker and has sensitivity to light and sound.
She no longer sings or even listens to music. She no longer drives a car. She barely leaves her home at all.
Her father said she was the happiest he had ever seen her when she moved to Las Vegas to become a teacher. It was her first job out of college. Her mother and grandparents are also teachers.
Her father, an immigrant from Africa, said her name translates to “crown princess” in his native language.
“What’s left of her is a hollow, empty human being, not a princess,” he said.
Martinez Garcia pleaded guilty in April to attempted murder, attempted sexual assault and battery with a deadly weapon resulting in serious bodily harm. He was charged as an adult and will serve his sentence in adult prison.
He will be required to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life upon release from prison.
On April 7, 2022, Martinez Garcia went to his teacher’s after-school office hours in her classroom. She was alone in her classroom, which is at the end of a hallway at Eldorado, she described during the sentencing.
She led him to a computer in the back of the room, out of view from the small window in the door, to pull up his coursework. That’s when he wrapped a cord around her throat and punched her, she said.
She passed out and woke up on the floor, unable to move, and passed out again. When she awoke again, he was strangling her with his bare hands.
He slammed her head against the tile floor and punched and kicked her. She passed out a final time and woke up again covered in blood, her clothing disheveled, wet, and she was being crushed by heavy classroom furniture.
He stomped on and cut her wrists, and asked why she wasn’t dead yet, the teacher said. During the attack, Martinez Garcia paused to take a phone call from his mother.
The teacher told Delaney that she convinced him to leave by saying that she would be dead soon. A janitor found her and called the police.
There was evidence that the victim also had been sexually assaulted.
Martinez Garcia’s public defender, Tyler Gaston, pleaded for probation for his client. While the prosecution called Martinez Garcia a man, Gaston called him a child with a supportive family who had been a good student and loving brother with no behavioral issues before he started taking a new medication for his asthma.
The Food and Drug Administration says the drug, montelukast, also known by the brand name Singulair, is linked to “serious neuropsychiatric events.”
The prosecution asked for a sentence of 22 to 55 years in prison.
Martinez Garcia was quiet throughout the hearing. He kept his head down as lawyers argued for and against imprisonment. He cried when his attorney played a slideshow of him as a smiling child.
Given the chance to speak, he said he wished he had spoken sooner about his mental health problems.
“I regret what I’ve done,” he said.
The victim said the maximum sentence would have been justified.
“I don’t ever want to have to think about it again,” she said. “But that will never happen.”
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