A Florida judge has sentenced 61-year-old Rafael Andres to death for the 2005 murder of Yvette Farinas following a resentencing trial ordered on appeal.
Farinas, a 31-year-old waitress, was killed inside the home she shared with her boyfriend. Andres, who worked as a handyman and had been hired to perform renovations at the property, had received a spare key from Farinas.
On Aug. 6, 2005, Andres used the key to enter the residence while Farinas was alone. Court records show he beat her until she provided her ATM PIN number, stabbed her, strangled her with a rice cooker cord, and set the home on fire before leaving the scene.
Investigators tracked Andres after he used Farinas’s ATM card to withdraw cash, purchase items at Home Depot, and gamble at a casino. Detectives used ATM transaction records, cellphone data, and DNA evidence from the crime scene to link Andres to the killing. Police arrested him in early 2006.
Andres was originally sentenced to death in 2015. However, that sentence was overturned after the Florida Supreme Court granted him a new sentencing trial following a 2016 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that found Florida’s capital punishment law unconstitutional.
In November, a new jury voted 9-3 to recommend the death penalty. During an April Spencer hearing, defense attorneys requested a life sentence without parole, submitting a 350-page document attributing Andres’s actions to cocaine use.
Prior to Farinas’s murder, Andres served 18 months of a nine-year sentence for the 1987 fatal stabbing of Linda Azcarreta. Azcarreta’s 7-year-old son, Rene, discovered her body at the time, later recalling, “I come home and I see her and she had already passed on.”
Miami-Dade County Judge Zachary James upheld the jury’s recommendation for the death penalty, citing Andres’s prior criminal record.
“The aggravator reflects the prior conviction,” James said. “The defendant served his sentence and then committed the new felony decades later.”
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