AURORA | A man who killed an Aurora apartment owner in 2010 has been sentenced to 55 years in prison, Adams County prosecutors said.
Investigators said Javier Aggurre, 37, fled to his native Mexico after the March 2010 slaying of Lyndsey Pham, 45, at the Desconso Apartments on East 16th Avenue.
He was arrested in Mexico and extradited back to Colorado in 2015 after Adams County prosecutors pledged not to seek the death penalty against him.
Aggurre was charged with first-degree murder after deliberation, first-degree felony murder and two counts of aggravated robbery, prosecutors said.
Last month he accepted a plea agreement with prosecutors and pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in exchange for a sentence between 50 and 55 years.
In a statement announcing the sentence, prosecutors said Pham’s husband, Michael Pham, agreed to a plea deal to spare his three children from reliving the painful details of their mother’s murder during a trial.
“They have had to endure countless delays and hearings as the defendant was extradited and the case was prepared for trial,” District Attorney Dave Young said in the statement. “I only hope that this sentence and the knowledge that the defendant will spend the rest of his life in prison will give Ms. Pham’s husband and children a sense that justice has been done.”
Lupe Rubio, Aggurre’s girlfriend at the time of the slaying, pleaded guilty in 2012 to helping Agurre plan the robbery and was sentenced to 19 years in prison.
At Rubio’s sentencing, prosecutors said she was the manager of the apartment complex and plotted the robbery with Aggurre. Rubio’s lawyer said she wasn’t present when the crime happened and said she never planned for Pham to be killed, only for her to be robbed.
Rubio was charged with murder but after a jury failed to reach a verdict during her trial in 2011, prosecutors reached a plea agreement with her that stipulated she plead guilty to a conspiracy charge and be sentenced to between 10 and 25 years in prison.