A polygamist from Ohio, Martina Esqueda, has been sentenced to 22 years in prison for orchestrating a horrifying revenge plot involving her husband and four other lovers torturing her boyfriend. The 29-year-old received the sentence on Thursday after attempting to justify her actions by citing a troubled childhood that lacked love and care.
Judge Lori Olender was not swayed by Esqueda’s claims, expressing her dismay at the case. “This case really has kind of sickened the court,” Judge Olender remarked, firmly rejecting any leniency based on Esqueda’s past.
Esqueda resided in Toledo with the victim, Austyn McClellan, 26, and her five other partners. She was found guilty of compelling these partners to abduct McClellan and subject him to a week-long ordeal of abuse in a motel room.
Throughout this brutal captivity, the group assaulted McClellan with a metal baseball bat, forced him to endure prolonged periods of standing, and restricted his access to food and water, allowing him sustenance only once daily.
During the sentencing, Esqueda’s attorney attempted to mitigate her responsibility by highlighting her abusive childhood, as reported by the Toledo Blade. However, this argument failed to persuade the court, resulting in a significant prison term for the self-styled leader of this disturbing saga.
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.
