FREEHOLD, N.J. (AP) - A jury convicted a New Jersey man Tuesday of strangling a former high school classmate and throwing her body off a bridge.
The panel reached its verdict a day after deliberations began in the trial of Liam McAtasney.
McAtasney was convicted of murder, robbery and other counts including desecration of human remains. He faces life in prison.
Michael Stern, the victim’s father, described sitting in court and watching McAtasney express no emotion during the trial.
“To think that somebody that pretended to be her friend did that to her without any remorse was painful, sad and beyond anything I’ve experienced before in my life,” he said. “It was sickening.”
Jurors had asked to review a secretly recorded conversation in which McAtasney talked about Sarah Stern’s death. In the video, he described how it took her a half-hour to die and he had timed it on his phone.
Monmouth County prosecutors allege that the 21-year-old McAtasney strangled the 19-year-old Stern during a December 2016 robbery and then dumped her body off the Route 35 bridge in Belmar, leaving her car on the bridge to make it appear that she killed herself.
Defense attorney Carlos Diaz-Cobo told jurors in his closing argument Friday that there was reasonable doubt that the victim was dead, since her body has never been found.
Diaz-Cobo also called the secretly recorded conversation an elaborate lie McAtasney told to impress the amateur horror filmmaker with whom he was conversing.
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