Life in prison for South Miami’s Facebook killer

When South Miami’s Derek Medina shot and killed his unarmed wife, he shockingly 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 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 all black and pink socks, on her knees, 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.

At trial, defense lawyers cast Medina 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.

This story was originally published February 5, 2016 at 11:53 AM with the headline "Life in prison for South Miami’s Facebook killer."