Sarah Coit (
)
A fashion publicist who butchered his ex-girlfriend in her Lower East Side apartment for trying to move on without him was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison this morning – and prosecutors are already pleading with the parole board to “never, never, never let him out.”
Raul Barrera, 33, had repeatedly abused his beautiful blonde girlfriend Sarah Coit during their three-year relationship, and she’d finally gathered the strength to leave him and start a new life in a new apartment on Clinton Street, prosecutor Matthew Bogdanos said.
“For months, she begged him to leave him alone, not to beat her again,” Bogdanos said. “She’d been so excited about a new life, a new home without him.”
He sent her texts and e-mails warning he wouldn’t let her go. One said, “You should sell popcorn. It’s going to be a show.”
He went to her apartment on April 10 of last year, and admitted he got to work after they argued.
“He beat her mercilessly first. That wasn’t enough. That’s not a show worthy of popcorn, and so he began to stab her,” Bogdanos said.
One knife wasn’t enough for his twisted “show” – he used a total of fives knives on her in three different rooms.
“He’s tracking her down with one knife after another. Three were steak knives; two were butcher knives,” the “kind you use on the toughest joints in the toughest animals. He used them on a 23-year-old girl,” Bogdanos said.
By the time he was done, she was partially decapitated with a knife stuck in her skull, a punctured lung, her intestines spilling out of her body – and still alive despite the 30 stab wounds.
Barrera cleaned himself up, changed his clothes and strolled out of her apartment.
Neighbors who heard her horrifying screams had tried to find out where they were coming from, to no avail. They called 911, but police didn’t have a solid location for where to look in the row of tenement houses.
When police found her about a half hour after the attack, “She was still alive, still conscious in what must have been excruciating pain,” Bogdanos said. “She had to know she was dying alone.”
Barrera, meanwhile, had gotten into a cab and told the driver to take him to Penn Station. He turned himself in after calling his father, who urged him to surrender.
He pleaded guilty earlier this year. Barrera’s lawyer, Paul Feinman, asked Justice Richard Carruthers to take both those factors into consideration before imposing sentence. He also said his client had long suffered from an undiagnosed mental problems, and had been in a bad place mentally at the time of the murder because he’d out of work and upset that Coit was dumping him.
Coit, a 5’10 stunner from Greenwich, CT, had been working for Lacoste.
Her father, Lynde Coit, a senior adviser to the CEO at Plasco Energy Group Inc., was in court as Barrera told the judge he was sorry for what he’d done. “She was a precious human being who I loved,” Barrera said, telling the family he he hoped they’d some day be able to forgive him “for depriving them of the presence of their wonderful daughter Sarah.”
Coit declined comment afterwards.
The judge told Barrera that everyone’s pain would have been spared had he just done what Coit had asked him, and left her alone. Carruthers said Coit had “great potential and promise,” and suffered “unbelievable agony” before her death.
He granted the prosecutor’s request and gave Barrera the maximum of 25 to life. Bogdanos put on the record that he was urging his future parole board to make sure he’s never released.