When the crime was committed, it was gruesome and shocking – two young ladies brutally stabbed to death in their home by an apparently deranged man. Blanca Rosa Esquivel, 17, and Sandra Esquivel, 18, were preparing lunch on the afternoon of May 22, 2006, when a knife-wielding Ryan Elston Horne, who was thirty years old at the time, entered their home and brutally murdered them.
Horne’s trial ended yesterday afternoon, and the jury found that Horne was guilty, but insane at the time he committed the crime. What this translates to is that sometime before he committed the crime, he was suffering from chronic paranoid schizophrenia.
Horne has been in lockdown at the Hattieville Prison for more than two years, before his case was finally heard in the Supreme Court of Justice Adolph Lucas.
A jury of seven women and five men agreed on November 28, 2008 that Horne was fit to stand trial. Horne, who had been diagnosed as having paranoid schizophrenia in the past, was fit to answer to the double murder charge against him. The jury made the decision after Dr. Emilio Molina, a psychiatrist who examined Horne, testified that Horne was not suffering from any delusions or hallucinations and that he was not psychotic at the present time.
The Esquivel sisters lived at the corner of Euphrates Avenue and Dean Street and when Horne, who was a next-door neighbor in the same apartment complex, entered their home, he began a savage stabbing frenzy.
According to a police report, Horne had attacked the sisters for no particular reason. He stabbed Blanca forty-five times and Sandra thirty times. The police also reported that when they arrived at the scene they saw Blanca lying on the ground near the entrance to her apartment with the alleged murder weapon, a six inch long knife, embedded between her legs.
Horne’s trial began last Monday, December 1. He was defended by attorney Alifa Elrington of the Pitts and Elrington law firm. Bernard Q.A. Pitts acted as an advisor to Alifa Elrington in this, her first murder trial. The prosecution case was presented by Crown Counsel, Nadine Palacio
The defense called three witnesses, while the prosecution called a total of ten witnesses.
The jury went into the jury room at 11:55 a.m. and came out at 3:06 p.m. with the guilty but insane verdict.