Wichita man acquitted of murder in girlfriend’s shooting, pleads guilty to gun crime

Amy Renee Leiker
·2 min read

A Sedgwick County jury on Thursday acquitted a Wichita man of second-degree reckless murder in the July 2019 shooting death of his 25-year-old live-in girlfriend.

A defense lawyer for Victor Castro, 32, announced the not-guilty verdict on Twitter.

The jury deliberated for less than two hours, said Dan Dillon, a spokesman for the Sedgwick County District Attorney’s Office.

“Victor and I are incredibly grateful the jury saw what we clearly saw from the earliest stages of the case — Victor Castro committed no crime here,” defense attorney Mark Hartman wrote Thursday morning on social media.

In an earlier post that Hartman later deleted, he wrote that Castro “is going home” after spending nearly three years in jail awaiting trial, “and I couldn’t be happier about it.”

“Our thoughts are with Miss Puente’s family, particularly her four children,” Hartman wrote Thursday. The children were home with their mother and Castro when she was shot around 8:30 p.m. on July 16, 2019.

The verdict comes after a four-day trial were prosecutors contended Castro fatally shot Elsy Puente “unintentionally but recklessly” with a Ruger semi-automatic 9mm handgun at their home in the 3100 block of South Elizabeth, near 31st South and Seneca. She was hit in the upper chest and died at a Wichita hospital. Castro was also hurt when the bullet struck his left pinkie finger.

Castro has maintained his innocence throughout, arguing the gun discharged accidentally when he tried to stop Puente from waving it around drunkenly after they split a bottle of tequila and had started on a second.

Wichita police have said the shooting happened after a “domestic violence disturbance” between the couple. One of Puente’s four young children told police that his mother and Castro had been arguing over some text messages Puente received from her kids’ biological father that Castro was angry about, according to an arrest affidavit released in the case. But Castro told police that he hadn’t been fighting with her, the document says.

In addition to murder, the Sedgwick County District Attorney’s Office also charged Castro with one count of criminal possession of a weapon by a convicted felon for carrying a handgun between May 9 and July 16, 2019, even though a previous felony conviction barred him from having one. Castro pleaded guilty to that count as his trial was underway Tuesday, court records show.

He will be sentenced for the gun crime on July 5. Judge Jeffrey Syrios presided over the trial.

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