NEW YORK, NY – A man from Ridgewood, Queens, has been sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for shooting his former girlfriend to death and attempting to kill her mother in Brooklyn. Gabriel Rivera, 30, was sentenced on Thursday by Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Rhonda Tomlinson. Rivera pleaded guilty on March 29, 2023, to charges of second-degree murder, second-degree attempted murder, second-degree criminal possession of a weapon, third-degree attempted assault, and first-degree stalking.
The incident occurred on October 7, 2018, when Rivera approached his former girlfriend, Sade Sanchez, while she was walking on Menahan Street in Bushwick with her mother and a friend. Rivera shot Sanchez five times, and after she fell to the ground, he continued to fire at her. He then pointed the gun at her mother’s face, but the gun did not fire. The victim died on the scene, while her mother and friend escaped injury.
Sanchez had ended her nine-year relationship with Rivera, with whom she shared two children, on September 1, 2018. Rivera repeatedly called and texted her and stalked her outside her home in the weeks leading up to the shooting. On October 6, 2018, he punched a male friend of Sanchez in the head outside her home, telling him that no one could be with “his woman.”
District Attorney Eric Gonzalez expressed his condolences to the victim’s family and friends and commended the work of the detectives and prosecutors involved in the case. “With today’s substantial prison sentence, this defendant will no longer be a threat to anyone else in our community,” he said.