Background: Jose Soto-Escalera in court with his attorney on Oct. 10 (Law&Crime Network). Inset: Tania Wise (St. Lucie County Sheriff”s Office).
A Florida man who was found guilty of murdering his pregnant lover and the baby she was about to give birth to received the ultimate punishment at sentencing.
Jose Soto-Escalera, 48, was convicted by a jury of two counts of first-degree murder last month in connection with the 2018 death of 23-year-old Tania Wise, who was about one week away from giving birth to a son she had named Josiah. Soto-Escalera was proven to be the father of the baby through DNA evidence, and prosecutors argued during trial that he became angry when Wise gave away money he wanted her to use to get an abortion.
On Friday, a judge sentenced Soto-Escalera to death for the two murders.
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Wise’s body was found abandoned on a country road on Aug. 24, 2018. According to prosecutors, her head was bashed in and her throat was cut. Either injury would have been fatal. As police investigated her murder, they found several communications between her and the married Soto-Escalera, whose wife was not aware that her husband had an affair with the younger woman.
As Law&Crime previously reported, Wise had told Soto-Escalera that she was pregnant with his child and needed money for an abortion. A witness who was with Wise when she made the request told police that Wise said “if she used Jose’s wife against him, she could get anything she wanted.”
Soto-Escalera agreed to give Wise $500 for the procedure, which she did not get. Instead, police said she gave the money to another man. This made Soto-Escalera “mad because Wise ‘played him,'” and he started asking around about a “dirty gun.”
Cellphone records put Soto-Escalera at the location where Wise was later found. Also found on his phone were Google searches for “dead body in woods” and “wooded area dead body” that were pinpointed to the time period before Wise’s body was found.
During Friday’s sentencing hearing, the judge read through the defense’s argument that Soto-Escalera had suffered through a difficult childhood and had even been bullied himself. In an effort to argue for a life sentence without parole, the defense said he had been a well-behaved inmate while in jail.
The jury had recommended the death sentence for Soto-Escalera, with eight jurors voting in favor of it and four voting against.
The judge ultimately sided with the jury’s decision, saying that “the aggravating factors” connected to Wise’s death and the death of her baby “outweigh the mitigating circumstances” in relation to Soto-Escalera’s past and behavior as an adult. With that said, the judge stated that “the death sentence is the appropriate and just sentence as to each victim.”
