Text messages, eyewitness testimony and the defendant’s flight helped prosecutors secure two first-degree murder convictions and life sentences.
TAMPA, Fla. — Text messages showed that Paula Cabrejo Molina wanted to leave her boyfriend before an argument inside her Tampa apartment ended with her death and the killing of her 14-year-old daughter, according to evidence presented in a murder case that concluded with life sentences.
Prosecutors used the messages to establish the state of the relationship between Cabrejo Molina and Jean Pierre Ojeda Salazar before the attack on Nov. 26, 2023. The exchanges indicated that the couple’s relationship was falling apart, according to courtroom reporting. They were one part of a broader case that also included an eyewitness, the physical evidence from two fatal stabbings and Ojeda Salazar’s departure from Florida. A Hillsborough County jury found him guilty of first-degree murder in both deaths.
The messages did not stand alone as proof of what happened. Diana Calderon, a friend who shared the apartment with Cabrejo Molina and her children, told jurors that she saw Ojeda Salazar attacking Cabrejo Molina on a bed. Mariana Cabrejo entered the bedroom to defend her mother. Prosecutors said Ojeda Salazar then stabbed Mariana before Calderon ran outside to find help. Her testimony supplied the immediate sequence that text records could not: the mother was attacked first, and her daughter became the second victim after trying to intervene.
Authorities were called to The Lodge at Hidden River apartments shortly before 9 a.m. Tampa police said officers reached the 14000 block of Riveredge Drive at about 8:53 a.m. after receiving a report of a seriously injured teenage girl. They found Cabrejo Molina, 35, and Mariana suffering from multiple stab wounds. The mother died at the scene. Mariana was taken to a hospital while still alive but died after arrival. The emergency response established the location and aftermath, while Calderon’s later testimony described what had occurred before officers entered the residence.
Prosecutors said Cabrejo Molina was stabbed 18 times and Mariana four times with a kitchen knife. The number of wounds became part of the state’s account of an intentional, sustained attack rather than an isolated strike during an argument. The prosecution paired that evidence with the deteriorating messages and Calderon’s testimony to argue that both killings constituted first-degree murder. The defense did not claim that someone else had caused the deaths. Ojeda Salazar’s attorneys acknowledged his responsibility for the stabbings but said the domestic confrontation had gotten out of hand.
That distinction was the main legal contest at trial. Acknowledging the physical acts did not resolve whether prosecutors could prove the mental state required for first-degree murder. Jurors had to evaluate the argument leading to the attack, Ojeda Salazar’s conduct toward each victim, the repeated wounds, the decision to attack Mariana after she entered the room and his actions afterward. Their verdict showed that they accepted the prosecution’s interpretation of the evidence and rejected an effort to characterize the killings as a lesser consequence of an uncontrolled dispute.
The state’s case also required jurors to consider each victim separately. Cabrejo Molina was the person involved in the failing relationship and the initial argument. Mariana was not a party to that relationship. She entered because she saw or heard that her mother was in danger, according to the eyewitness account. By returning first-degree murder verdicts on both counts, the jury found that Ojeda Salazar bore the same highest level of criminal responsibility for killing the teenager as for killing her mother.
The verdicts came shortly before midnight on June 11, 2026, following a trial in Hillsborough County. Ojeda Salazar, then 27, did not take the witness stand. The convictions represented a more serious final outcome than the mixture of charges police announced after his arrest. In November 2023, authorities listed first-degree murder with a weapon, second-degree murder with a weapon and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. Prosecutors later pursued and proved two counts of first-degree murder based on the evidence developed through the investigation.
After the guilty verdicts, the proceeding shifted from responsibility to punishment. Prosecutors had sought the death penalty, requiring jurors to hear further evidence and arguments before recommending either death or life imprisonment. Prosecutor Lindsey Hodges emphasized Mariana’s experience during the attack, telling the panel that the teenager witnessed her mother’s suffering before she was killed. The penalty presentation focused not only on the number of victims but on the circumstances that brought Mariana into the bedroom and made her a target.
Jurors deliberated for about 90 minutes and did not recommend execution. The decision resulted in life sentences for Ojeda Salazar. It did not reduce or overturn either conviction. Instead, it determined the punishment attached to the jury’s findings of first-degree murder. The final outcome means he will remain imprisoned for life, while avoiding the death sentence prosecutors had requested. Any future litigation would involve appellate or post-conviction review rather than another jury determination of guilt.
Ojeda Salazar’s conduct after the attack added another part to the prosecution’s chronology. Tampa police said he left the apartment complex in a white sedan and later abandoned the vehicle. Investigators determined that he had traveled to Maryland and gone to his brother’s home. The U.S. Marshals Capitol Area Fugitive Task Force arrested him there on Nov. 27, the day after the killings. His departure did not prove every element of the murder counts by itself, but it allowed prosecutors to present jurors with a continuous sequence from the failing relationship to the attack and then to his flight.
Once returned to Florida, Ojeda Salazar sought release on bond. A Hillsborough County judge refused that request in December 2023 after hearing from a family friend and an investigating detective. The judge cited the evidence involving Mariana’s effort to protect her mother and ordered Ojeda Salazar held while the case proceeded. The decision ensured that he remained in custody during the long interval between arrest and trial. At that hearing, the allegations were still unproven; the 2026 jury verdict converted them into criminal findings.
The relationship evidence also gave context to a loss that extended beyond the courtroom. Friends said Cabrejo Molina had moved from Colombia to the United States in hopes of building a better life for her children. She was the mother of another daughter, who was 4 years old when Cabrejo Molina and Mariana were killed. Members of the Colombian community in Tampa later held a vigil, remembering the mother and teenager and supporting relatives confronted with two deaths and the needs of the surviving child.
State Attorney Suzy Lopez said the case was heartbreaking and described Mariana as courageous for trying to defend her mother. Lopez said the verdict held Ojeda Salazar accountable and delivered a measure of justice for a family permanently changed by the murders. The prosecutor’s statement framed the convictions as the formal response to conduct that had begun in a private relationship but ended with consequences for two children, an eyewitness, extended relatives and a community that gathered publicly to mourn.
The record now shows a relationship approaching its end, a morning argument, the killings of a mother and daughter, a flight of more than 800 miles and a prosecution that lasted more than two years. Ojeda Salazar’s life sentences close the trial and penalty stages. The text messages that documented Cabrejo Molina’s desire to leave remain significant because they place the violence within the final breakdown of the relationship without changing the larger legal finding: he was convicted of deliberately murdering both her and Mariana.
Author note: Last updated July 15, 2026.