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Sonja Mitchell was just a teenager when she met Brian Schwartz. She thought he was everything. The young couple built a life together and had three children. They were very happy, very loving. She kind of felt like her life had became complete. But after 10 years, Sonja would suddenly be a single mother. Brian Schwartz had gone missing. There might have been some foul play involved. The search for answers would expose all of Brian's secrets.
Brian Schwartz apparently made his living by selling drugs. But the secret Sonja was keeping would horrify everyone. Something very violent had happened in that house. And we were like, wow. And the authorities would be left wondering, was it really foul play? This mattress was just this stain of blood and tissue and bone.
Or was it justice? It was either him or her. I stopped, sir. I don't want to tell you. Pueblo, Colorado, September 4th, 2009. It was Labor Day weekend in this blue-collar town of 100,000, an hour and a half south of Denver. Pueblo's an industrial city, unlike many Colorado cities, because we have a steel mill here.
But there are also plenty of wide open spaces just outside of town. And one resident, a retired wildlife officer, was dove hunting up on the prairie west of Pueblo when he spotted something curious. Animals were digging around in the area, which interested him to find out what they were digging up. He went and began digging a little further and found what he believed to be human remains. Investigators with the Pueblo County Sheriff's Office were soon on the scene.
We pulled up and the wildlife officer pointed out to me where he had been digging. We walked over to the site where I saw what appeared to me to be a human skull. And considering where it was found, how the dead body got there wasn't much of a leap.
It would not be common in any way for a person to be buried in an extremely small, very shallow grave under two feet. So you have to suspect that there's potential for foul play. But before they could figure out just who put the body there, the authorities would have to identify it, which led the investigators at the scene to make a couple of calls. One was to a forensic anthropologist.
A forensic anthropologist uses clues from the skeleton to, first of all, identify somebody or help identify somebody. The other was to the Pueblo police.
I contacted the Pueblo Police Department investigation sergeant and asked him if he had any missing persons cases. They were working. And the answer the investigator got just might have been the break he needed. They did have a missing person under some suspicious circumstances. The Pueblo police were currently investigating the disappearance of 30-year-old Brian Swartz, the victim of an alleged kidnapping.
His girlfriend, Sonia Mitchell, had reported that Brian was taken by some Mexican nationals. She said they were going to basically, you know, whack him out. Could the two cases be connected? And if so, did the body in the shallow grave mean the kidnappers had carried out their threat? Or was there another reason that someone would want Brian dead? A secret that only his 24-year-old girlfriend, Sonia, knew.
Born in 1985, Sonia Mitchell started life in El Paso, Texas, the middle of three sisters. Me and Sonia are three years apart. Me and Priscilla are five years apart. It wasn't a happy childhood. Their father was on drugs. I don't know. It was just, I kind of gave up.
there for a while. It was scary. It was depressing. It was frustrating, you know, seeing the abuse. I didn't know what really was going on or what was happening next. And when Sonia's father went to prison on drug charges in 1993, Margaret was determined to give her kids a better life. He had a three-year sentence. My mom took the opportunity and she left. You see your mom getting hit. It's not right.
Somebody talks too bad, it's not right. I was trying to break the chain. To make that break, Margaret took the girls to Colorado. My mom wanted to be with her family, so she moved back to Pueblo, Colorado. I got my apartment, I got a job at the nursing home when we started working.
However, while her mother was able to make a fresh start, the transition was difficult on 10-year-old Sonia, who had a hard time adjusting to her new town and new school. And as a result, she formed a tight bond with her younger sister, who was only eight.
Sonia and Priscilla were really close. They always took care of each other. And eventually, they not only adjusted to life in Pueblo, they excelled. They were ahead in school. I loved it. Sonia and her sister also did well after school. I put them in gymnastics, ballet. But raised by a single mother, they had to help out at home. I taught the girls to do their own laundry.
'cause I was working two jobs. - And that was how in 1999, 14-year-old Sonia first met Brian Swartz. Six years older than Sonia, Brian's family had been in Pueblo for generations. - It's kind of a sixth generation town where
Your great-great-grandparents grew up here and now you grew up here. We were always going on family reunions and there was probably between 150 to 200 of us. In his immediate family, Brian was one of three brothers. Brian and his brothers and father were close. Worked on cars all the time. They were our family mechanics.
And in 1999, after graduating high school, the aspiring mechanic got his own apartment, which is where he met Sonia. She was doing the laundry, and she met Brian in the laundry room. She apparently made quite an impression, too. Brian came over with candy and flowers.
But could he win over her mother? But despite being forbidden to see him by her mother, Sonia and Brian's relationship blossomed. I had to work, so after school she was meeting him.
that I didn't know. She thought he was everything. He's older and has a car, and she was easily impressed with all that. And by the time she was 15, Sonia was pregnant. Of course, she said she was in love and she wanted to have his child. It appeared that Brian was just as ecstatic too. They were very happy, very, very just excited and happy.
very loving. And despite her family's objections, Sonia moved in with Brian. As long as she was with Brian, nothing could faze her. Sonia gave birth to a daughter in 2000 and dropped out of school to take care of her little girl. Sonia let go of everything, and the baby and Brian were her priority. And in 2002, at the age of 17, Sonia gave birth to a second daughter.
Brian was a proud father of two little girls, and Sonia was a mother raising her two children. And despite her initial objections, Sonia's mother warmed to Brian, and after the birth of her grandchildren, gradually accepted him as part of the family. They were very happy, I'd say, for the first two years. Just normal, you know, being a couple, taking care of the babies. It was great.
They may have been happy, but the young couple did have some issues to overcome. Despite having two children to take care of, Brian seldom held down a regular job. The only job I knew of Brian having was at Walmart, and he briefly worked for the newspaper. He did earn some money as a shade tree mechanic.
My grandma had a couple cars fixed by Brian and his dad. And at one point, Sonia had to take a part-time job to make ends meet. I worked at Domino's Pizza. I told her, "Come on out and be my pizza maker." Although since she dropped out of high school, Sonia had a hard time advancing beyond minimum wage. She tried several times to get her GED. But with two kids to raise, she struggled to make all the required classes.
She'd get those two steps ahead and then she'd be knocked back three. And at the age of 20, after getting pregnant with their third child, Sonia put finishing her education on hold once more. Sonia seemed happy about being pregnant. Sonia had the baby, a little boy, in 2005.
Brian was over the moon. Brian was ecstatic to have his son to carry on the last name Swart. According to Brian's cousin, Sonia seemed content too. She kind of felt like her life had became complete. She had her two little girls and Brian had his little boy and life was going to be this happy go lucky life from there forward.
And by the time they'd been together nearly 10 years, Sonya and Brian had built a family and seemed to be planning their future. But in reality, was their happy-go-lucky life haunted by a host of dark and deadly secrets? Coming up, the police get an anonymous call about Brian. They felt like there might have been some foul play involved. But is there a logical explanation for his disappearance?
It's not illegal to be missing. Some individuals don't want to be contacted. On August 11, 2009, the police in Pueblo, Colorado, received a curious call concerning Sonja Mitchell's boyfriend. Got information that a gentleman by the name of Brian Schwartz had gone missing. Somebody is reporting they hadn't seen Brian Schwartz for a couple, two or three weeks. Exactly who reported the 30-year-old mechanic missing remained a mystery.
Crime Stoppers, everybody that calls in is to remain anonymous. But the caller did say they suspected Brian hadn't just disappeared. They felt like there might have been some foul play involved. And when the investigators did a quick check, running Brian's name through their database, it looked as if the caller might have had a point. He had an extensive history with the public police department. When I was looking into his lifestyle, he had some drug charges.
Brian's rap sheet included charges for possession of marijuana and cocaine, a few distribution arrests, and a few assault charges, though he'd never spent more than a day or two in jail. However, the fact that Brian had a record immediately had the investigators wondering, could the Crimestoppers caller be right? Was Brian's sudden disappearance the result of foul play?
Because of his lifestyle, there's a high likelihood of something bad that could have happened. Especially since he had a history of selling drugs. Certainly being in the narcotics business like Brian was, that's a very unpredictable lifestyle. Or could it mean there was another explanation for his disappearance? Maybe Brian was simply laying low for some reason. There's always the possibility that Brian doesn't want to be found. It's not illegal to be missing.
Some individuals don't want to be contacted, and it's not illegal to do that. Or could he have gone out of town on a drug run? When the investigators ran Brian's vehicle registration, they got the first clue about his possible whereabouts, or at least the whereabouts of his van. The van was found abandoned on I-25 south of Reto, New Mexico.
Was the abandoned van more evidence of foul play? The authorities in New Mexico didn't think so. When I spoke with the New Mexico State Police, they said it apparently broke a fan belt and probably overheated, so it was left on the side of the road.
Brian's abandoned van appeared to be a dead end. Running the registration did give them his address, though. But when the investigators went to check it out, it wasn't Brian or Sonia Mitchell, Brian's 24-year-old girlfriend and the mother of his three children, who met them at the door.
He was a friend of the family, according to what he told the investigator.
He had a girlfriend, common-law wife, and they had kids. And their kids and Sonia and Brian's kids, they would all play together. Eloy at the time said that Sonia wasn't there, and as we were speaking, Sonia pulled up in a vehicle. And when the investigator explained why he was there, that someone had called Crimestoppers to report Brian missing, Sonia said that was more or less true. She says that...
They had gotten into an argument a couple weeks prior to that, and he loaded up a bunch of his stuff in his van and left. According to Sonia, she hadn't heard from Brian since, and she said that was just fine with her, and his drug dealing wasn't the only reason she was glad he was gone. She tells me that they did not have a good relationship. There was a lot of domestic violence.
She spelled out some pretty horrific treatment from Brian. At one point, she told us that he had started choking her out and was telling her that he was going to kill her. Then he stopped choking her right when she was about ready to pass out. She said that he looked at her and told her he didn't want to kill her by choking her because when people die like that, they defecate on themselves and they vomit, and he didn't want to have to clean up all her mess.
But if Brian had done such terrible things, could that mean Sonia had something to do with his disappearance? She reassured me that she still loved him and she would never hurt him. For the moment, at least until they could verify her claims, the investigators didn't see any reason not to believe her. I didn't feel like Sonia was...
Overly nervous or anxious by any means. That's why I took what she told me as being truthful. And when the investigators spoke to Brian's father, he didn't seem all that worried about his son being missing either. According to the father, he would go missing for weeks at a time. In fact, according to his father, Sonia wasn't the only one who'd parted with Brian on bad terms.
He tells me that the last time he had seen Brian, they had gotten into an argument, a fairly heated argument, about a vehicle that they co-owned together. And I guess Brian had gotten upset and mad and left and hasn't spoke with him since. Alongside what Sonia had already told them, his father's story had the investigators wondering whether Brian was missing at all.
With those two stories, it sounds like that Brian's just not getting along with a lot of people in his life. And maybe he did choose to put some distance between himself and the people that he seemed to be having rocky relationships with. And both stories seemed to fit with the investigators already knew about Brian. He had a history. There was some drug dealing history. He was a violent person.
His volatile past and previous run-ins with the law might have tempted the authorities to simply stop looking into Brian's disappearance. It's not something that you're going to call out the troops and start searching a grid search somewhere for him. But there was still that nagging possibility of foul play. It heightened our awareness a little bit more about the case.
Therefore, the investigators made one final attempt to track down Brian's whereabouts via his cell phone records. Selling illegal drugs, they rely heavily on their phones for their business. And if Brian was still using his phone, it offered the police a chance to find him.
Cell phone data could not necessarily get an exact location, but you could find what particular cell tower was essentially sort of transmitting data to a particular phone. And based on that tower, you could kind of estimate the location of a particular call.
When the investigators pulled Brian's phone records, it revealed what they expected. The small-time drug dealer all but lived on his phone. The biggest thing that really stood out to me, there was hundreds and hundreds of hours of use. Right up to July 27th, approximately two weeks before the Crimestoppers call that kicked off the missing persons case. From that day on, all that activity stops.
That's a huge red flag. One that sent a loud and clear signal to the investigators. At that point, we suspected it was a homicide case. Coming up, Sonia changes her story. He's in trouble and he needs some money. And the investigators make a gruesome discovery. Decomposition is consistent with somebody who hasn't been seen for a month.
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quince.com slash snapped. By August 27th, 2009, it had been more than two weeks since the Pueblo, Colorado Police Department had received an anonymous Crimestoppers call reporting 30-year-old Brian Swartz missing. We talked to his father, who said he hadn't heard from him for a few weeks. And Brian's girlfriend, 24-year-old Sonia Mitchell, said she hadn't seen him either, not since he'd stormed out during an argument.
It appears that him and Sonia had a very rocky relationship because there was many reports of domestic violence type calls. The rocky relationship could have given Brian a reason to simply leave. But the investigators were starting to wonder if there might be another explanation for why he had apparently abandoned his van and stopped using his phone. We began to kind of think, well, maybe foul play was involved.
But if so, was Brian's criminal activity to blame? Brian Schwartz apparently made his living by selling drugs. He was selling anything from marijuana to cocaine and using the products himself. Or could his alleged abuse of Sonia have something to do with it?
Anytime you hear that kind of activity, there could be some motivation for maybe some retaliation. That's one of the first things that comes to your mind is, all right, you know, there's some sort of abused spouse or battered woman syndrome. Not that Sonia had given any indication she might have had anything to do with Brian's disappearance when police questioned her at her house. And when she dropped by the police department on August 27th, she seemed genuinely concerned about him.
She started off by asking me if I had heard from Brian, and I told her I hadn't. And that's when Sonia dropped a bombshell. She said, well, look, I hadn't been 100% honest with you. According to Sonia, what she told them earlier about Brian leaving after an argument wasn't true, because she'd been reluctant to tell the police what Brian had really been up to.
She then goes into telling me how Brian makes runs to Mexico, picking up drugs, bringing them back to Cuervo and selling them. And on his latest trip, according to Sonia, Brian had gotten into a serious jam. She receives a call from him saying that he's in trouble and he needs some money. There was a big narcotics transaction taking place, and he'd messed that deal up. So he was into these guys for some money.
Sonia said that she tried to round up some cash, but couldn't. And a few days later, Brian had come home, escorted by four henchmen of the drug dealer he owed money. Sonia told us that four Mexican nationals showed up at their house, that Brian loaded some of his personal property in his van. A gun safe that contained several firearms, a large screen TV, cameras.
some tools, some kind of a refrigerator that she called it a kegerator. And then, once all the loot had been loaded up, Brian and the drug dealer's henchman had driven off. She said that was the last time she'd seen him. It was a frightening story, but was it true? His drug dealing background lent a little credence to her story. And so did the fact that his van had been found ditched along the road between Pueblo and Mexico.
It makes sense it might have been in transit down there or they may have taken Brian down there. But when the investigators, hoping to get some clues about the drug dealer's henchmen, went back and spoke to Brian and Sonja's neighbors, one neighbor had seen something quite similar to what Sonja described.
She had seen, I believe, a black Ford Bronco a number of days prior, pulling up with a number of people, loading what appeared to be personal items to include TV and a large gun safe into this Ford Bronco and then drive off. However, according to the neighbor, Brian was nowhere to be seen.
The neighbor says, "Well, I saw Sonja and some other people loading these items." And that wasn't all the neighbor had seen either. It turned out that Sonja hadn't been lying when she said Brian had disappeared after a fight.
One of the last times that they had seen Brian, they witnessed Brian and Sonja in an argument, screaming match out in the street. And then it turned physical. Brian was dragging Sonja back to the house by her hair. That kind of piqued everybody's interest. Maybe she had done something in self-defense or something had happened.
But it was a few days later, on September 2nd, when the investigators tried to get back in touch with Sonja, that things really got interesting. She had moved out of the house. She had apparently left in a hurry, too. The cupboards were open. There were, you know, canned goods on the counter. There was clothes thrown about. It's like they were gone, you know, in the middle of the night and just out the door they went.
The fact that Sonia appeared to be on the run gave new urgency to the investigation into Brian's disappearance. But then, on September 5th, a call to the Pueblo County Sheriff's Office would move the investigation into a disturbing new direction. The call came from a retired wildlife officer who'd been out hunting that morning and stumbled onto a gruesome discovery. They found possibly human remains buried in rural western Pueblo County.
The remains were badly decomposed, but sheriff's investigators were able to tentatively identify the gender of the deceased. We were able to determine it was potentially a male. And hoping for a lead on the dead man's identity, the sheriff's investigators started reaching out to area law enforcement.
you immediately begin looking at missing persons. Which eventually led them to the investigator looking into Brian Swartz's disappearance. Lieutenant Don Leach contacted me and told me about some remains that were found in a rural area west of Pueblo. But was it Brian? Hoping for confirmation, the sheriff's investigators brought in a forensic anthropologist to examine the remains.
The decomposition pattern is consistent with somebody who hasn't been seen for a month. And whoever the dead man was, it appeared that he had been murdered. There's a peculiar blunt trauma pattern injuries on this cranium. There were three impacts that I could identify. There were two on the front of the face, and there was one just behind the ear. And when it came to identifying the corpse, the investigators got lucky.
On his hand, there was enough skin that they could get a fingerprint. And they were able to identify the remains as Brian. Five weeks after he disappeared, the search for Brian had become a homicide investigation. So obviously Sonya is a potential suspect.
But where was she? Word on the street was that to find her, the police should track down 29-year-old Eloy Varos. A so-called family friend, he'd answered Sonia's door back in August when the police first went looking for Brian. We've been told they're spending a lot of time together, even to the point that they're living together. And that left the investigators wondering, was it a new relationship? Or did it have something to do with Brian's death?
When we dug into Brian Swartz's life, we could tell he was a very jealous person, very violent person, not somebody that would put up with another man possibly being with the mother of his children. Whatever had happened, the investigators were anxious to talk to Eloy, and they would get their chance on September 14th.
He walks into the police department, wanted to talk about the case. Obviously, the word got out to Eloy that the police were looking for him. Once Eloy sat down with the investigators, he claimed that he had nothing to hide, opening up about how he knew Brian Swartz. Eloy even went as far as to tell us that he would help Brian with his narcotics business. Brian would bring the loads of marijuana to Pueblo.
And Eloy Varos helped him sell the marijuana. However, Eloy also admitted that he'd gotten more than a little extra cash out of the deal. Him and Sonia were having sexual relations when Brian was making these narcotics trips to Texas. He was living with Sonia while Brian was gone, and then as soon as Brian would show back up, Eloy's out of the picture.
they just had a love triangle and he ended up falling for sonya a little bit more than anybody just messing around somebody just a one-time thing you know what i mean so he ended up with sonya he wanted to take care of her he really genuinely cared for her and he told the investigators that brian treated her horribly he was a witness to the abuse he was definitely a witness to the violence that brian was prone to
However, he denied having anything to do with Brian's death. I think he's trying to outsmart us and outthink us, and he's trying to put himself in a position to not get in trouble. I think he was trying to, in some ways, try to protect Sonia, explaining the violence that Brian was capable of and the violence that he had witnessed.
But if he was trying to protect Sonia and himself, Eloy may have made a serious mistake. At one point in the interview, he made a passing reference to something that immediately caught the investigator's attention. He gave us a piece of information that, frankly, ended up, you know, making this case just basically turn upside down. He told us that he had rented a storage unit and that Sonia had stored some of her property in there. That was one of those aha moments that,
you know, every detective wishes for, and we got it from Eloy. Because when the investigators got a search warrant for the storage unit, they made a surprising discovery. Items that she tells us that he had taken with him with the Mexican nationals. However, the tools, TVs, and other valuables the drug dealer's henchmen had allegedly taken weren't even the most damning thing the investigators found. We opened up the storage unit, and I pulled a mattress out
And there it was. Right on this mattress was just this stain of blood and tissue and bone. Coming up, Sonia's arrest leads to a tense standoff. All the cops came. Their guns were drawn. And she makes a startling confession. I can't live like this no more. I can't.
On September 14th, 2009, nine days after finding Sonya Mitchell's boyfriend, Brian Swartz, buried in a shallow grave outside of town, the Pueblo, Colorado police made a major breakthrough in the case, one that came courtesy of Sonya's lover, Eloy Varos. There's kind of this weird love triangle going on there. During an interview with the police, Eloy had accidentally mentioned that he'd rented a storage unit for Sonya.
It wasn't his intention. I think he slipped up. And to be honest, I don't even know that he understood until it was all said and done what exactly he had told us. We went into the storage shed and searched it, and they found a mattress that appeared to have a large blood stain on it. As soon as we saw that, we were like, wow. And the day after finding the mattress, the investigators went to Brian and Sonia's house with another search warrant and a chemical called luminol.
Illuminol is used to detect blood that's not necessarily visible to the naked eye. It will even reveal where blood has been cleaned up. And when the investigators sprayed the chemical in Sonja and Brian's bedroom, the results were astonishing. We also found what's called cast-off blood on the ceiling. Something very violent had happened in that house. The bloody ceiling coupled with the bloody mattress from the storage unit led the investigators to an inescapable conclusion. Obviously, that was the murder scene.
And from there, the investigators moved quickly to take Sonia and Eloy, who'd rented the storage unit, into custody. Once we find the blood in the house, arrest warrants go out. But could the investigators find them? It had been almost two weeks since Sonia and Eloy had moved out of her house and gone into hiding. When they left that house, they left in a hurry.
So it was a welcome surprise when shortly after the judge signed her arrest warrant, Sonia and her mother showed up at the storage unit, totally unaware that the police had just searched it. Obviously, they were there to remove the stuff that was in the storage unit. While we were getting into the garage, that's when all the cops came, the detectives, their guns were drawn.
I was in shock. I didn't know what was going on. They put Sonia in the car, and she was just staring at me and crying. And she told the detectives, take the handcuffs off my mom. She had nothing to do with it. Sonia had a look of resignation on her face and said that she wanted to talk and tell us the truth about what happened, and she didn't want anybody else to get in trouble. Taken into custody and brought in for questioning, Sonia didn't deny killing Brian.
She told us that, of course, the story about the Mexican nationals was absolutely not true. But mostly, she wanted to talk about the abuse she'd suffered over the years. One incident in particular that stands out is he laid out some plastic on the floor of the house, stripped her of her clothes, and so she was naked on this plastic.
And he poured some type of accelerant on her. That level of violence, and it was just, it was crazy to hear her talk about that. And yet she never left Brian, who she'd been with since the age of 14. He would tell her he would, and then he would go back to the old violent Brian.
In fact, as Sonja pointed out, the police couldn't even make drug charges stick. Sonja said she hadn't considered running away an option either.
So according to Sonja, she'd suffered in silence for years. I can understand how Sonja was so demoralized and mentally abused, physically abused, and just dominated by Brian.
Eventually, though, the discussion turned to the beginning of August 2009. She said that on the night that he died, Brian was in a particularly foul mood. He told her that he wanted to have sex, and she didn't want to have sex. I was like, no, get away from me. I don't want to be with him. Are you brain-tweezed? She said that once that whole episode of violence was over, he took a bunch of pills, and he went to sleep.
Sonia didn't sleep, however. Instead, she told the police that Brian's brutal rape had been a wake-up call. Once Brian had passed out, she tells us that she knew that was her opportunity. I snapped, sir. I don't know what to tell you. I'm going to rape you and then I'm going to kill you.
According to Sonia, while Brian was passed out, she picked up the heaviest thing she could find. Sonia said that she used a weight bar to beat Brian. Sonia said that Brian's death had sent her into shock.
She kind of described to us that it almost felt like she wasn't there. You know, like it was in a fog or a dream or she didn't really believe it was taking place. But eventually, the fact that Brian was really dead had sunk in, leaving Sonia in a dilemma.
I didn't know what to do. I found like the biggest thing I had. It was a large plastic storage tub, according to Sonia. I pulled him off the bed and I put him in it and I stuffed him in there. Then she said that she dragged the storage container into the back of the van and drove it out to the edge of town. I just pulled over and I started digging and I got tired. So I just stopped and I just threw him in there and covered him up and walked away.
Sonia said she was also the one who ditched Brian's van along the roadside in New Mexico. And once back in Pueblo, Sonia said she'd come up with the story about Brian and the Mexican drug dealers in order to cover her tracks. Right away from the very beginning, everybody believed me.
Everybody believed me because he had been doing the drug trafficking for so long. And Eloy, did he have anything to do with the murder? According to Sonia, the only thing he'd done was help her move Brian's things into storage. So Eloy tells you he helped you get rid of Brian? No, sir. Because he didn't. Nobody talked to me.
And while the investigators were moved by what she had been through, they doubted that part of her story, that she had acted alone, was true. Miss Mitchell was a slight woman, I think 5'5", maybe 120 pounds. Mr. Schwartz was a pretty big guy, 6'5", 2+. I still had kind of in the back of my mind that, you know, maybe Eloy was involved as well. But for the moment, Sonia's confession was more than enough to charge her with murder.
To be able to take her statement, match it up with what we were seeing at the crime scene and the stuff we recovered from the storage unit was good for us. It was perfect. But one question remained. What would a jury make of Sonia's heartbreaking confession? Coming up, Sonia tells her story in court. There was things I was shocked to hear about. But will sympathy for what she endured be enough to sway the outcome? Murder was committed. We can't just look the other way.
By August 5th, 2011, it had been almost two years since Sonja Mitchell admitted to killing her boyfriend, Brian Schwartz. She had been physically assaulted and then sexually assaulted by Mr. Schwartz. And as he was sleeping, essentially just bludgeoned him to death.
However, contrary to her confession, Sonja hadn't acted entirely alone. Questioned after Sonja's arrest, her sister Priscilla told police that she, her husband Perry, and Sonja's lover Eloy Varos had all helped dispose of the body. Sonja confided in Priscilla, and Eloy, Perry, and Sonja end up going over to the house. They do put Brian's body in this tote, like Sonja described.
And by August of 2011, all three had pleaded guilty to accessory to murder charges, and all but Priscilla received three-year sentences. Priscilla, in exchange for what she had told us, we gave her a sentence of probation. But what would Sonia's confession end up costing her? The first-degree murder can carry a life sentence. Taking Sonia's case to trial could be risky, though, considering the circumstances. Sonia exhibited all the signs of a battered spouse...
So in 2011, the prosecutors had offered Sonia a deal. She agreed to plead guilty to second-degree murder. Which left the 26-year-old mother of three facing anywhere from 10 to 30 years in prison. The sentence was essentially left open to the court, the judge. And at her sentencing hearing on August 5th, Sonia made a plea for leniency.
She could present her side of the story, essentially offer witnesses and testimony to the nature of her and Brian Schwartz's relationship. There was a few things I had heard and a few things I was shocked to hear about. Some of the incidents of abuse that Sonia described were sickening. The most heartbreaking one. As he was asking her questions, he would heat this knife up. And if she responded with the wrong answer, that knife went against her back.
And she had the scars to prove it. I never knew until she stood up in court and showed up. It's obvious she's a long-time victim of abuse. Which, in the end, did stay the judge's hand, at least somewhat. The court imposed a sentence of 20 years for the charge of second-degree murder. 20 years was a bitter disappointment for Sonia's family. It was either him or her. That's how she felt.
She felt like he was really gonna kill her. Like she had nowhere to go. Sonia had been through a lot. It should have been a lesser sentence for Sonia, especially with all that abuse. Perhaps, although the prosecutors disagree. We all sympathize with what she went through, but at the end of the day, you know, murder was committed. We can't just look the other way on that. Had she just come forward after it happened, obviously she wouldn't have gotten off, but I think things would have been different for her.
Sonia Mitchell was released on parole in May 2021. She was discharged from parole in March 2024. She was 38 years old. Abuse is never okay. If you or someone you love is in an abusive relationship, there is help available. Call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-SAFE.
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