A former high school football player who admitted to fatally stabbing a classmate because she was six months pregnant with his child has been sentenced to 65 years in prison.
Aaron Trejo, 18, was sentenced in an Indiana courtroom on Tuesday for the 2018 killing of 17-year-old Breana Rouhselang in an alley behind her Mishawaka house. He pleaded guilty to murder and feticide in October.
Rouhselang’s mother, speaking to WNDU following the sentence, likened her family’s suffering to a nightmare she lives “every day.”
“All I just want to say is I’m glad we got justice for Bre, but no amount of time will ever replace what he took from me,” Melissa Wallace told the South Bend station.
Trejo, who was 16 at the time of Rouhselang’s murder, told investigators he plotted to kill the cheerleader and manager of the Mishawaka High School football team because she didn’t tell him she was pregnant until she was too far along to get an abortion.
Trejo said he was armed with a knife from his kitchen and asked Rouhselang to meet him behind her house on the night of Dec. 9, 2018. Once there, he strangled and stabbed her in her heart and then disposed of her body in a nearby restaurant’s dumpster with a garbage bag covering her head, according to a criminal indictment.
Trejo initially denied knowing what happened to Rouhselang when Wallace confronted him about her daughter’s whereabouts but then confessed to the killing under police questioning.
“I took action,” Trejo was quoted as telling a detective. “I took her life.”
St. Joseph County Superior Court Judge Elizabeth Hurley, who handed down Trejo’s sentence, said the teen will likely serve at least 75% of his sentence, meaning he’ll be around 67 years old when released.