Mop-slay mom Mexican Immigrant

How can anyone read this article without asking "Is she an IA?"


Teary kid says she'll never forgive mop-slay mom Florencia Vazquez for killing sister

BY William Sherman and Rich Schapiro
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS

Originally Published:Tuesday, August 17th 2010, 1:26 PM
Updated: Wednesday, August 18th 2010, 1:12 AM

Florencia Vasquez, who was charged with second-degree murder, manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide in the death of her daughter Alejandra back in 2008, stands at her sentencing hearing.


The heartbroken teenage sister of an 11-year-old girl beaten to death by their mom with a mop handle lashed out Tuesday as the woman was tossed in prison.

"To her, we were all animals," Florencia Vazquez's 15-year-old daughter, Imelda, wrote in Spanish in a letter read by a court interpreter.

"My mother deserves to get a lot of time in jail for all the harm she has done. ... I will never forgive her for what she did to us."

Brave Imelda stood solemnly beside the translator as her emotional letter was read inside Brooklyn Supreme Court.

Her eyes welled with tears when Justice Neil Firetog sentenced her mother to 16 years behind bars for brutally killing her sister Alejandra. Vazquez also was hit with a concurrent sentence of seven years for assault.

Vazquez pleaded guilty Aug. 2 to savaging her schoolgirl daughter with the handle in October 2008 - and leaving her to die on her bed.

She struck her daughter so hard that the wooden handle shattered in two.

Alejandra's lifeless body was found two days after the attack, when a man who rented a room in the family's East New York apartment spotted the corpse.

Cops said Vazquez, a mother of five, abused Alejandra and Imelda because she despised their father, who was living in Mexico.

A Brooklyn Family Court judge had removed Imelda from the home before her sister was killed.

"She brought us here with lies and told us we'd have a better future here, but they were lies," wrote Imelda, who is in foster care along with her three young siblings.

"I do not want my siblings to suffer the harm that my sister did," she wrote.

After Vazquez was led away in cuffs, her attorney insisted that she's repentant.

"She cries often. She's sorry for what she did," lawyer Andrew Friedman said outside the courtroom. "She can't explain why she did it, only that she did it."

In court, the stone-faced Vazquez appeared defiant.

Asked if she wanted to give a statement, the murderous mom was overheard ripping her daughters.

"I brought them to this country, and this is how they pay me," she was overheard saying to a court interpreter.

Vazquez's boyfriend, Andres Pavon-Balderas, was charged with manslaughter in the gruesome slaying.

He pleaded guilty to criminally negligent homicide last Friday and is awaiting sentencing on Aug. 30.

Sources said the Mexican immigrant is expected to be sentenced to time served and deported.

wsherman@nydailynews.com

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