Eliazar Martinez-Rodriguez (Clackamas County Sheriff's Office).
An Oregon man is headed to prison for stabbing a romantic rival through the heart in an "act motivated by jealousy" after finding out the victim was seeing the same woman as him, prosecutors say.
Eliazar Martinez-Rodriguez, 35, was sentenced this week to 25 years behind bars after he pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter for the June 2024 killing of 30-year-old Jefferson Cates, as well as second-degree assault for a separate jailhouse attack.
"Martinez-Rodriguez … stabbed Cates in the heart," a press release from the Clackamas County District Attorney's Office says.
Martinez-Rodriguez and Cates were romantically involved with the same woman, according to prosecutors. Martinez-Rodriguez had been seeing the woman at the Crown Court apartments on Southeast 97th Avenue in Oregon City, but did not know she had also allegedly been intimate with Cates.
When Martinez-Rodriguez found out, he "became enraged," according to the DA's office.
"On June 22, 2024, the woman and Cates returned to her apartment and encountered Martinez-Rodriguez," the DA press release says. "Cates was unnerved by Martinez-Rodriguez's behavior and walked away."
Martinez-Rodriguez later found Cates elsewhere in the Oregon City apartment complex and attacked him. Witnesses reported hearing a "blood-curdling scream" while Cates was being stabbed.
"I carry Jefferson's ashes with me every day, but you carry his blood on your hands," said Cates' mother, Lynette Brunson, during Martinez-Rodriguez's sentencing hearing on Tuesday.
"The violent and vicious manner in which Mr. Martinez-Rodriguez murdered Jefferson by stabbing him in the heart … caused me to have recurring nightmares resulting in high blood pressure, a stroke and heart damage called takotsubo cardiomyopathy … nicknamed 'broken-heart syndrome,'" Brunson explained. "Because that is exactly what Mr. Martinez-Rodriguez has done, breaking not only my heart, but the hearts of everyone who knew and loved Jefferson."
Martinez-Rodriguez was already on supervised release from federal prison at the time of the killing after serving a sentence for a firearms charge. He violated the terms of that release by leaving the Northwest Regional Re-Entry Center in Portland, where he had been ordered to live, according to prosecutors.
Martinez-Rodriguez was arrested and returned to federal court, where a judge ultimately allowed him to remain out of custody and return to the re-entry center.
A month later, Cates was dead.
"The federal judge's decision 'to let Mr. Martinez-Rodriguez out of custody literally haunts me,'" Brunson said.
In May, Martinez-Rodriguez assaulted another inmate without provocation while being held at the Clackamas County Jail. He struck the prisoner with a "barrage of 50 or 60 punches to the head and face," leaving him flat on his back "with a bloody face and struggling to breathe," the DA's office says.
The injured inmate was taken by ambulance to a hospital and survived.
Martinez-Rodriguez received 230 months for the manslaughter conviction and 70 months for the assault, for a total of 300 months.
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