AURORA | A man who stabbed his roommate to death following a dispute over WiFi in an Aurora home last summer has been sentenced to more than three decades in state prison.
An Arapahoe County District Court judge on Thursday sentenced 27-year-old Craig James “CJ” Kilgore Jr. to 35 in years in prison for the stabbing death of Jose Maria Romero last August.
Court documents state that Kilgore got into a fist fight with Romero in the lower level of a
home at 1635 Mobile St. shortly after 4:30 p.m. on Aug. 17, 2020. The scuffle occurred moments after another person living in the home declined Kilgore’s request for a phone with WiFi capabilities, according to an arrest affidavit.
When police arrived at the home a short time later, Kilgore reportedly said: “Don’t shoot me. I’m sorry. Just take me to jail,” records show.
In an interview with detectives later that evening, Kilgore admitted to punching Romero and stabbing him once in the chest using a roughly 4-inch-long kitchen knife without a handle. He said that he dragged Romero’s body down a flight of stairs after he stabbed him and continued punching his body.
Kilgore told investigators that he “lost it because of everything going on in the world,” according to the affidavit.
A doctor with the Arapahoe County Coroner’s Office later determined that Romero, who was in his early 30s, died of a single stab wound to the heart.
An acquaintance of Kilgore’s told police that she had invited Kilgore to stay at the home several days before the stabbing because he was homeless and had nowhere else to go. The same person told authorities that the fight was “possibly over the WiFi” as she had given Kilgore and Romero a black Android cell phone to use and share, according to the affidavit.
The officers who first interacted with Kilgore later told their supervisor that he “appeared to be incoherent and possibly on drugs.”
Kilgore pleaded guilty to one count of second-degree murder in April as part of an agreement with prosecutors, according to a spokesperson for the 18th Judicial District Attorney’s Office.
Kilgore is currently detained at the Arapahoe County jail in Centennial awaiting transfer to state prison, county records show. He’s scheduled for another court appearance in a separate felony case on July 6.