A man from Florida will spend the rest of his life behind bars for the fatal hit and strangling of a manager of a motel, whose battered and unconscious body was found by her husband.
Stephen Havrilka, 34, received a life sentence on Monday after he had beaten the 46-year-old woman and pushed a towel in her throat in the Rodeway Inn in Venice in April 2021, according to police and local points of sale.
Authorities said that the brute, who had stayed in the motel for almost a week, attacked Tina Stradler when he followed her in a room that she cleaned.
Strader’s bruised and bloody body was discovered in a cupboard by her wheelchair-bound husband, who went looking for her when a series of SMS messages remained unanswered for almost an hour, the couple agreed to stay in touch when she came in and left a room.
“She texts me when she starts the room, so I’ll know,” Tina’s husband Gerald Strader WFLA told.
“Nobody had seen her. When I went then and finally opened the door, I found her. ‘
The destroyed husband called for help and an employee removed the towel from Strader’s mouth and made resuscitation until she was taken to a local hospital, According to Sarasota County Sheriff Kurt Hoffman.
The mother of four, who also had two grandchildren, was declared dead later that day.
Delegates discovered video surveillance that Havrilka captured and came into the motel room around 8:50 am – just a minute after Stradler had entered and her husband had sent an SMS.
The tattooed murderer was seen 14 minutes later with a white towel and his shoes, said representatives before he was arrested by five officers a short distance from the motel.
“We could never distinguish a motive,” assistant lawyer Karen Fraivisse people told.
“However, he is an extremely violent person with previous episodes and I think he just wanted to kill a different person. He must disappear forever. There was no relationship between the suspect and the victim. ‘
Havrilka, who has a long and violent criminal history with 36 earlier arrests, various crime judgments and four stints in prison, pleaded guilty of second -degree murder, According to the Miami Herald.
He was also beaten with a different life sentence for an incident in the prison of Sarasota County in 2024, The Herald Tribune reported.
“In the same hotel there was a violent man, a murderer, who was just released from prison because he had brutally read his own mother reading by Fraivisse in the court, according to the Herald Tribune.
“In summary what everything has taken from her and from us, it is honestly impossible to divide into measurable steps.”
