Year: 2021

Edgar Diaz was a seventeen year old teen killer from New Jersey who would stab his mother to death in a parking lot. According to court documents Edgar Diaz would stab his mother multiple times and banged her head off the cement causing her death. Edgar Diaz would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to eighteen years in prison

Edgar Diaz 2023 Information

Edgar Diaz is being housed in the juvenile division of the New Jersey Department Of Corrections

Edgar Diaz More News

A Manchester teen who admitted fatally stabbing his mother in front of his 4-year-old brother with a knife he made in high school shop class begged for a second chance before a judge sentenced him Friday to 18 years in prison.

Superior Court Judge Wendel E. Daniels imposed the prison term on Edgar Diaz, who was 17 when he killed his mother, 44-year-old Margarita Diaz, in front of a Toms River medical office on Aug. 7.

“That person that night was not me,” an apologetic Diaz told the judge before he learned his sentence. “It’s just not who I am.”

Diaz said he had dreams of marrying his girlfriend, buying a home, working as an auto mechanic and becoming a U.S. citizen.

“All I’m asking is for a second chance — a second life,” he told the judge.

Diaz broke down in tears as he recalled a recent dream he had where he was playing soccer in the rain and he received a call on his cellphone. It was his mother.

“I told her that ‘I’m sorry, can you forgive me?’” Diaz said, wiping tears from his eyes with a handcuffed hand. “She said ‘Yes.’”

He said his father still visits him at the juvenile detention center and the two often speak by phone.

His father, Edgar Diaz Sr. asked the judge for leniency. He said his young son, who witnessed his mother’s killing, persistently asks him when his older brother is coming home.

“My son, he’s a good young man. He was a very good kid — playful, loving,” he said, speaking through an interpreter. “We’re just asking for you to grant him a second chance at life.”

Diaz Sr. broke down in sobs as a translator relayed his son’s sentence in his native Spanish.

In handing down the sentence, Daniels noted that Diaz launched a  “vicious attack on his mother.”

“You still have a life,” Daniels told Diaz. “Your mother does not. It’s up to you to make the most of it.”

Madeline Buczynski, assistant Ocean County prosecutor, said the court needed to focus the victim, and not a “dream version” of her. She said Diaz’s actions “silenced” his mother.

Buczynski described Margarita Diaz as a hard-working and devoutly religious woman who believed in parenting with “tough love.” She drilled into her teenage the son the importance of school, work and church.

Edgar Diaz believed she was overbearing. Prior to the stabbing, Margarita Diaz and her son were arguing because she was angry he was chatting with a stranger on the internet, Buczynski said.

That argument prompted Edgar Diaz to repeatedly slash and stab his mother with a crudely made knife and later beat her on the pavement of the medical office parking lot, the prosecutor said.

The victim was killed for “parenting her child,” Buczynski said.

“Margarita Diaz gave him life,” she said. “He ruthlessly took hers.”

Diaz’s attorney, Bill Smith, asked for a 10-year sentence, noting that family and friends describe him as a respectful and loving young man who generally had a good relationship with his mother. He even had been named “student of the month” at Manchester High School just months before the killing.

He wasn’t known to be aggressive and violent, and didn’t have any prior criminal history, Smith said.

“It is very difficult to comprehend how an incident like this can occur between mother and son,” he said.

Diaz will have to serve 85 percent of the term before he can be considered for release on parole, under the state’s No Early Release Act. 

The sentence was two years shorter than what was called for in a plea bargain.

Diaz, now 18, pleaded guilty to aggravated manslaughter on Jan. 17 just days after the case moved from family to adult court.

In entering his guilty plea, Diaz told the judge he fatally stabbed his mother in front of his 4-year-old brother, with a knife he made in a high school shop class, and later made up a story about his mother being attacked by a man dressed all in black.

A heated argument preceded the stabbing outside the Deer Chase Professional Park on Route 37 in Toms River, he said. 

Although Edgar Diaz was 17 at the time, prosecutors charged him as an adult.

The argument started when he returned home from working on painting projects with his uncle, Diaz said at the plea hearing. A few hours later, he, his mother and 4-year-old brother drove from their home in Manchester to the Deer Chase Professional Park in Toms River to see his father, who was cleaning an X-ray office there, he said. 

The argument continued along the way, he said. When they arrived at their destination, Edgar Diaz, seated in the back seat next to his younger brother, plunged his homemade knife into his mother’s chest, he said.

Edgar Diaz told the judge at the plea hearing that he didn’t have a clear memory of the incident and couldn’t say how many times he stabbed his mother. His next memory was getting out of the car and seeing her lying on her back on the pavement outside the vehicle, he said. Then, he said he heard a noise.

“I heard crying inside the vehicle,” he said at the plea hearing. “It was my brother.”

After that, he knocked on the glass door of the building where his father worked and told him “something happened.”

When police responded to the lot of the medical park shortly before 9 p.m., they found Margarita Diaz unresponsive. A neighbor had called 911 to report she heard people screaming and fighting inside a car parked near the complex.

First responders tried to revive the victim, but she was pronounced dead at nearby Community Medical Center in Toms River.

In an extended interview with detectives, Edgar Diaz told them the man dressed in black approached their vehicle, mumbling and asking for help. He told them that when his mother rolled down the car window, the man started beating her and then pulled her out of the driver’s side door and stabbed her, according to a police affidavit. Diaz claimed he tried to help his mother by punching the stranger in the back. 

Diaz became a suspect after investigators noticed inconsistencies in his story and couldn’t find any evidence to substantiate it.  

Diaz was arrested Aug. 13 and charged as a juvenile. He was just a few weeks away from the start of his senior year at Manchester High School, where he had  made the knife he used to kill his mother in a shop class during his freshman year.

Authorities in January sought to prosecute Diaz as an adult, and they initially charged him with murder, weapons offenses and endangering the welfare of a child.

The murder charge was downgraded to aggravated manslaughter as part of a plea bargain in which the other charges were dismissed

https://www.app.com/story/news/local/courts/2020/03/06/manchester-teen-gets-18-years-prison-killing-mom-front-4-year-old-brother/4969073002/