Life in prison for South Miami’s Facebook killer
When South Miami’s Derek Medina shot and killed his unarmed wife, he posted a photo of her body on Facebook with a prediction he was “going to prison or death sentence.”
“You foretold your future,” Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Yvonne Colodny told him on Friday.
And with that, she swiftly sentenced Medina to life in prison for the August 2013 murder of Jennifer Alfonso, a killing that drew worldwide notoriety with one upload to the Internet.
Before he was sentenced, Medina refused to apologize or even look at the tearful relatives of his former wife. Instead, he bizarrely implored President Barack Obama to “focus on corruption” and announced plans “to sue the world.”
“Basically, I didn’t get a fair trial,” he said. “Only God knows the truth.”
Jurors in November convicted Medina of second-degree murder for the killing Alfonso, 26, after a bitter argument inside the kitchen of their South Miami town home.
Prosecutors said Medina gunned down Alfonso in cold blood. The photo Medina posted on Facebook showed Alfonso, a Denny’s waitress, wearing black and pink socks, twisted backward in a bloody heap. The images stayed online for hours before the site took them down.
“He had to make a spectacle of Jennifer’s body,” prosecutor Scott Dunn told the judge on Friday.
Medina’s Facebook post repulsed the public. Critics called the killing a symptom of a society obsessed with social-media-fueled fame. He claimed he did it as a way to notify Alfonso’s family of her death.
At trial, defense lawyers cast Medina – a condo security guard supervisor – as a spouse battered by an abusive wife who called him the “woman” in their tumultuous relationship. They claimed Alfonso had a kitchen knife in her hand, even though Medina himself told police he had disarmed her of the blade – which she pulled only when he approached wielding his .38-caliber pistol.
Medina also told police that he fired only after Alfonso “kept on punching me like crazy” near his temple or neck.
On Friday, Alfonso’s relatives remembered a young woman whose 10-year-old daughter was upstairs at the time she was shot to death.
“She was a wonderful, amazing person,” Carolyn Knox, Alfonso’s mother, told the judge. “Very forgiving, funny, smart. She had so much to give and unfortunately, now that’s gone.”
His father, Tony Alfonso, said his daughter was never violent toward her husband.
“That’s a fantasy he created,” Tony Alfonso said angrily, pointing at Medina, who sat cuffed in the defendant’s box.
In the courtroom gallery, Medina’s father cursed the man under his breath. “Yeah right, buddy.”
None of Medina’s family spoke in his support.
This story was originally published February 5, 2016 at 2:13 PM with the headline "Life in prison for South Miami’s Facebook killer."