ARAPAHOE COUNTY, Colo. — A man convicted earlier this year of murdering four people at his ex-girlfriend’s home in Aurora in 2022 was sentenced Tuesday to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Joseph Castorena, who declined to provide any sort of statement in court Tuesday, was sentenced by Arapahoe County District Judge David Karpel to life without the possibility of parole for the murders of three of her ex-girlfriend’s relatives and the murder of a man staying in an RV in the backyard of the home.
He will also have to serve 24 years in the Colorado Department of Corrections for the attempted murder of his ex-girlfriend, Jessica Serrano, which will run concurrently with the first four counts of first-degree murder, of which he was found guilty earlier this year.
Castorena had broken into a home near. E. 10th Ave. and Geneva St. on Oct. 30, 2022, and ambushed the family living there, shooting and killing his ex-girlfriend’s twin sister, his sister’s husband and the sisters’ father, as well as the man staying in the RV.
Records show a court had granted Castorena’s ex-girlfriend and her father a protection order against him a week before the deadly shooting.
Castorena’s brother and cousin were arrested in the days after the shooting, but the suspect continued to elude authorities for several months, fleeing into Mexico to avoid capture.
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He was found and arrested in Mexico in December 2022 with the help of the FBI, local police officers in Mexico, the Instituto Nacional de Migración – Mexico’s immigration enforcement agency – and the Mexican government, according to a spokesperson with the Aurora Police Department, and extradited back to Colorado in March of 2023.
In court Tuesday, prosecutors said Castorena showed no remorse for the murders during his trial, going so far as to blame his ex-girlfriend “until the very end” for his actions that day.
While the sentencing can “never, ever repair the pain and grief that Joseph Castorena has caused these families,” prosecutors hoped the sentence would give them peace knowing that “he will never hurt Jessica, his little girls or her family ever again.”
Judge Karpel commended Jessica for her “extraordinary courage in the most difficult of circumstances given the evidence of this case,” and said that in over 30 years of working in the criminal justice system, he had never seen a case like this before.
“I’ve had many people stand before me as defendants and say, ‘I’m not a bad person, I just did the wrong thing’ and I’ve sometimes agreed with them,” Judge Karpel told the defendant. “But Mr. Castorena, you are the biggest exception to the rule.”
He continued: “Your actions were those of an insignificant, little man with a big gun who had to control the people in his life that he supposedly loved, and did so with such abject violence. This insignificance of yours,” Judge Karpel said, “will dissipate in time into ether where you will become forgotten.”
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