The construction worker who killed actress-director Adrienne Shelly in her West Village office was sentenced to 25 years in prison yesterday. Diego Pillco, an illegal immigrant from Ecuador, pleaded guilty last month, and yesterday, he faced her family's sadness and rage.
Shelly's mother Elaine Langbaum mentioned her young granddaughter Sophie, "The baby [Shelly] wanted for so long will never know her mother. "She will never hold her mother's hand, kiss her mother's face or feel her mother's hug." And Shelly's husband Andrew Ostroy railed against Pillco:
Pillco had said"You stalked and brutally attacked my wife, silenced her screams with your hand until you rendered her unconscious and then, in a brutal and gruesome act of cowardice, took a bedsheet and strangled her to death. You tied her up and hung her the way you strung up pigs back in Ecuador...
...You deserve no mercy. I want you to rot in that cell...For the last 499 days, I have been consumed by unfathomable grief. I will spend the rest of my days hating you with every fiber of my being for what you have done...
No sentence would be enough for you."
, "I came with the purpose to do work, and to help my family out...I have suffered because I know what I have done. If there were a death penalty, I would take it. All I want to say is I know they're not going to forgive me. This is what I deserve." He will be deported when he completes the 25-year sentence.
