A Covina man who worked for U.S. Customs and Border Protection pleaded guilty on Friday, April 19, to a federal charge for kidnapping his wife in 2016 in an incident that resulted in her death.
Eddy Reyes, 38, who lived with his wife in Santa Ana before she vanished, entered his plea in downtown Los Angeles.
The charge carries potential sentences of the death penalty or life in federal prison without parole. However, the government has agreed to not seek a sentence greater than 30 years in exchange for Reyes’ plea.
If prior to sentencing Reyes provides information leading to the recovery of the missing remains of Claudia Sanchez Reyes — so they can be returned to her parents in El Salvador — federal prosecutors will lower their recommendation to 25 years.
Sentencing was set for Aug. 2.
Reyes — an employee at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Long Beach office — admitted that he kidnapped his then-21-year-old wife on May 6, 2016, after suspecting she was having an affair.
Claudia Reyes had left work that night from El Pollo Loco in Garden Grove. After Reyes filed a missing-person report four days later, Santa Ana police conducted an investigation that revealed co-workers heard the woman fighting with her husband the night she disappeared, before he picked her up in a rented SUV, according to an affidavit.
A cadaver dog went into the Hyundai SUV, the document notes, and detectives found a drop of Claudia Reyes’ blood inside.
Court papers document a history of domestic abuse by Reyes against his wife, including several threats to kill her; Claudia Reyes obtained temporary restraining orders against her husband in 2014 and 2016.
According to his plea agreement, Reyes said he met with a half-brother at a McDonald’s restaurant in Los Angeles one month before the kidnapping to plan the killing. Reyes had been estranged from his half-brother but contacted him because he had been a gang member and a gravedigger in El Salvador, Reyes said.
The defendant told his wife the Hyundai Santa Fe was a gift for her.
When Reyes arrived at her workplace, the half-brother was under a blanket in the SUV, Reyes said in his plea agreement. He took her to his mother’s in Orange, parking in the garage. After punching the woman, the half-brother took a seat belt, wrapped it around her neck, and strangled her to death, Reyes stated in the plea agreement.
Reyes said he then helped his half-brother push the body into the back seat and eventually into the cargo area of the Hyundai.
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The next day, Reyes used Claudia’s cell phone to pose as her and text her workplace saying she would not be in that day. The half-brother, posing as the woman, sent a text message to a paralegal who worked for Claudia Reyes’ divorce lawyer stating that the attorney was no longer needed, Reyes said. The half-brother, the plea agreement says, again posing as the woman, sent a text to her mother in El Salvador saying she was moving to New York with a new man and leaving her 4-year-old son with her husband.
It was not immediately clear if the half-brother had been charged in the case.
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