QUEENS — A former champion boxer, who prosecutors said stabbed and bludgeoned his ex-girlfriend to death with a pipe on a Jamaica street in broad daylight three years ago, was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison, the Queens District Attorney announced Thursday.
Prosecutors said that Trevis Hall — a featherweight boxer and former Golden Gloves champion known in boxing circles as “Black Mamba" — attacked 31-year-old Margarita Rivera on Watson Place near Polhemus Avenue in December 2014, stabbing her numerous times in the chest and beating her in the head with a metal pipe.
Police found Rivera in a pool of her own blood down the street from her home. When she was asked who did this to her, she managed to say “Tre” three times, the DA's office said.
She later succumbed to her injuries at Jamaica Hospital.
The knife and pipe used to bludgeon Rivera were both recovered at the crime scene.
Hall, of Far Rockaway, who was 28 at the time, was discovered that same day unconscious and intoxicated in a dumpster on 127th Street in Richmond Hill.
He was taken to Jamaica Hospital and later arrested. Police found a Home Depot receipt in his pocket showing he'd purchased the pipe found at the murder scene just 90 minutes before the killing, the DA said.
In July, Hall was found guilty of murder and criminal possession of a weapon in the slaying of Rivera, prosecutors said.
Queens DA Richard Brown said in a statement that “in a violent rage [Hall] carried out a brutal execution of his former lover.”
“Breaking up with someone should not equal a death sentence,” he added.
Steven Silberblatt, Hall's defense attorney, called the sentence “excessive," and said he was planning to file an appeal.
“Mr. Hall is not a criminal in the ordinary sense,” he said. “He was a champion boxer and his only criminal record has to do with this particular relationship.”
