A twisted Ohio polygamist has been sentenced to 22 years in prison for ordering her husband and four of her lovers to torture another one of her boyfriends in a sick revenge plot.
Martina Esqueda, 29, was slapped with the hefty sentence on Thursday after trying to claim that the lack of love she received as a child was to blame for the deranged attack on 26-year-old Austyn McClellan last year.
“This case really has kind of sickened the court,” Judge Lori Olender said while refusing to go light over the sob story.
Esqueda, who lived with the victim and her five other lovers in a house in Toledo, was convicted of forcing her deviant beaus to kidnap and terrorize McClellan inside a motel room for more than a week.
The deranged lovers savagely beat the victim with a metal baseball bat, forced him to stand for long periods and only allowed him to eat and drink once a day.
During her sentencing, Esqueda’s lawyer tried to argue that the cult-like matriarch only ordered the attack because she was abused as a child, the Toledo Blade reported.
“She does not understand love, because she has never felt it,” her attorney, Morgan Isenberg, said.
“The people who were supposed to love her, supposed to support her, supposed to help her grow, they broke her.”
The judge, however, quickly rejected the excuse, sayin that Esqueda “took all that trauma … and threw it against somebody else, put them in the same position you were in.”
The victim directly addressed his brutal ex to tell her the ordeal left him with lifelong trauma.
“I continue to have nightmares about the horrific things you and those men did to me, Martina, because none of this would have happened had you not been the ringleader or mastermind behind every bad thing that happened to me,” he said in a statement read out to the court.
The harrowing ordeal unfolded on March 14 last year when Esqueda’s husband, Michael Esqueda, 28, and her boyfriends Aaron Bradshaw, 49, Austin Bradshaw, 28, David Cessna, 26, and Chance Johnston, 27, forcibly took the victim to the motel.
She hatched the nightmarish scheme as retribution for an apparent scuffle at her home.
Esqueda is said to have broken her arm when she and the victim were trying to break up a dog fight. She later told her lovers, though, that the victim had actually crippled her limb.
The tortured man was only rescued after his captors eventually let him venture to a Speedway convenience store days later.
Esqueda was convicted of first-degree kidnapping and second-degree felonious assault.
Her husband and three of the other men have already been sentenced over their involvement in the twisted attack.
The last perp, David Cessna, is set to be sentenced next week.
Read the full article here
