Kimberly Ortiz-Zayas was overjoyed in May 2022, her family said Monday. After years of heartbreaking fertility issues,
she was ready to welcome her son, Eliel,
into the world in a few months’ time. A baby shower was planned, according to her sister, Ashley Ortiz, and essentials were being bought.
Meanwhile, Tiara Rodriguez-Diaz was busy raising her own son, Legend. Her family said she was a devoted, caring mother. “Every moment spent with her was a gift from God,” her aunt Vicky Diaz said.
The link connecting those two women was Mamadou Kallie, who, those same relatives told a Chester County judge, subjected them to years of constant abuse and deserved every moment of the three consecutive life sentences, without parole, he was given Monday for killing them and his unborn son.
“I hope he never sees the light of day,” Ruth Zayas, Ortiz-Zayas’ mother said. “I know he will pay for everything he did, and I hope one day he realizes what he has done to two families.”
Kallie, 26, was
convicted in March of
three counts of first-degree murder for shooting Rodriguez-Diaz, 20, with whom he had a son, as well as Ortiz-Zayas, 21, who was several months pregnant with an unborn son he had pushed to be aborted.
In handing down that sentence, Chester County Court Judge Analisa Sondergaard said it was striking to her that Kallie has shown little remorse for his actions. Despite the overwhelming evidence against him, she said, Kallie never admitted to the killings, nor expressed regret that women he claimed to love were dead.
First Assistant District Attorney Erin O’Brien, who prosecuted the case, pushed for the consecutive life sentences to signify the severity of Kallie “brutally executing” the victims as they were trying to cut him out of their lives.
His actions, O’Brien said, disrupted multiple generations of two families, and were clearly carried out with purpose.
“These were not fleeting actions; there were so many times in that one night he could have hesitated,” O’Brien said. “The victims’ only mistakes were loving the wrong man.”
Kallie chased the women down
as they met for the first time.
He shot them at point-blank range as they sat inside Rodriguez-Diaz‘s car, while Legend, then 22-months-old was sitting in the back seat.
He then took the boy, soaked in his mother’s blood, to a neighbor, confessing that he “killed his baby moms,” before fleeing, according to evidence presented at his trial.
Police later arrested Kallie, still armed with the murder weapon, at a nearby Wawa.
Kallie took the stand during the trial, weaving a convoluted and often contradictory story about the night the women died. He testified that a rival, whom he refused to identify, had threatened to kill the women to seek revenge on him.
He chased the women down to warn them, he said, and watched, helplessly, as a masked assassin shot them and sped off.
O’Brien, the prosecutor, called his story “ludicrous,” and urged jurors to disregard it. They seemingly did.
During the five-day trial, O’Brien chronicled the toxic relationships — which occurred simultaneously — between him and the two women. Kallie subjected them to physical and emotional abuse for years, sometimes threatening to kill them or their loved ones if they didn’t meet his controlling demands.
That abuse reached its peak in May 2022, at a cookout in Coatesville. Rodriguez-Diaz, fed up that Kallie had been seeing another woman and had gotten her pregnant, confronted Kallie and stormed off after a heated argument that moved concerned bystanders to call 911.
Rodriguez-Diaz had had enough, O’Brien said, and contacted Ortiz-Zayas for the first time. The women met up to do discuss how Kallie had been treating them, and had decided to end their relationships with him for good.
But Kallie had no intentions of losing the women. If he couldn’t have them, O’Brien said, no one could.
Kallie tracked the women down, chasing them as they rode in Rodriguez-Diaz‘s car. On a secluded stretch of Glencrest Road in Valley Township, Kallie forced Rodriguez-Diaz off the road and shot her as she sat in her car.
Ortiz-Zayas tried to escape and pleaded with Kallie to spare her, reminding him she was pregnant. Kallie shot her as she lay on the pavement.
Even after his arrest, Kallie continued to torment the victims’ families, prosecutors said. From county jail, he wrote a letter to Rodriguez-Diaz’ mother, demanding that he be allowed to play a role in raising his son.
“Ms. Diaz could not process that, while awaiting trial, the defendant would write to her and ask to see his son, without acknowledging what had happened because of his actions,” O’Brien said.
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