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A 25-year-old American woman was murdered in San Carlos, California, allegedly by her ex-partner Jose Rafael Solano Landata, 33.
Landata is accused of the brutal murder of the young woman, Karina Castro, in September, when he allegedly decapitated her with a samurai sword.
Eyewitnesses said they witnessed the murder, and said Landata committed the act in front of Castro’s children.
The suspect was previously romantically involved with the victim and they have a child together. Castro had a restraining order against him. According to reports, messages were also found on her phone in which the suspect threatened to kill her.
Landata claimed he did it in self-defense. He said he and Castro were fighting when she started talking to another man and that she threatened him and told him she was "Pay people from Palo Alto to eliminate him, his mother and his brother".
He also claimed that in the same confrontation in September she was the one who approached him with the knife and he swung his sword and hit her in self-defense. However, according to the lawsuit, there is no evidence that the victim was holding a knife when Landata attacked him.
In his youth, the suspect was diagnosed with schizophrenia and has been medicated for more than a decade. Therefore, the legal proceedings against him were halted until a doctor certified that he was fit to stand trial at the end of January.
