The case followed Linver Ortiz Ponce from a Bay Shore street to a gas station and then to a church lot.
BAY SHORE, N.Y. — Linver Ortiz Ponce escaped one attack and tried to hide at a gas station before a group abducted him and took him to a church parking lot, where prosecutors said he was shot to death on orders from Kayla Alvarenga.
The final sentence in the case came Tuesday, when Alvarenga, 23, was ordered to spend life in prison without the possibility of parole. A Suffolk County jury had convicted her in March of first-degree murder, kidnapping, robbery and conspiracy. Prosecutors said the violence began with a demand that Ortiz Ponce move his red Chevrolet Camaro from outside Alvarenga’s Fifth Avenue home and ended with his killing at the House of Prayer Church of God.
Ortiz Ponce, 29, of Central Islip, parked on Fifth Avenue shortly before midnight on Sept. 17, 2022. Prosecutors said Alvarenga confronted him and told him to move. He refused. That refusal, prosecutors said, led Alvarenga to call Christopher Perdomo and several teenagers to the block. District Attorney Raymond A. Tierney later said the victim was dead because he parked in front of the wrong house, describing the killing as a chain of choices directed by Alvarenga.
The first attack did not happen at the church. Prosecutors said the group came to Alvarenga’s home in a BMW stolen hours earlier during a carjacking in Bay Shore. They pulled Ortiz Ponce from his Camaro as he slept, beat him and took the car. He got away on foot. The escape moved the case away from the residential street and toward the second scene, where cameras would later record part of the pursuit that prosecutors used to explain the night to jurors.
At the gas station, Ortiz Ponce tried to conceal himself between vehicles, prosecutors said. Alvarenga and others split between the stolen Camaro and the stolen BMW while searching for him. Prosecutors said Alvarenga saw him and alerted the others. Video from the gas station showed him being forced at gunpoint into the BMW, according to the district attorney’s office. That footage helped tie the first confrontation, the search and the later shooting into one continuous course of conduct.
The trip from the gas station to the House of Prayer Church of God was not a break in the violence, prosecutors said. Perdomo beat Ortiz Ponce with a gun during the ride. Alvarenga led the group to the church parking lot, where the victim was beaten again. Prosecutors said Alvarenga then ordered Perdomo to shoot him. Ortiz Ponce tried to crawl away before he was shot multiple times. The defendants fled in the vehicles they had taken, leaving the church lot as the final crime scene.
The Camaro was later found abandoned in a wooded part of Smithtown, about 15 miles from Bay Shore. That discovery gave investigators another location in a case already spread across a home, a gas station and a church. Prosecutors said the car was the same vehicle that had drawn Alvarenga’s anger at the start of the night. Its recovery also supported robbery counts tied to the taking of Ortiz Ponce’s vehicle during the attack outside the home.
The court process stretched across several years. Perdomo was arrested in Georgia in May 2024. In September 2025, he pleaded guilty to murder, kidnapping, robbery and criminal possession of a weapon, later receiving 20 years to life in prison. The teenagers who took part in the crimes also pleaded guilty and were sentenced. Alvarenga went to trial, and the jury found that she did more than participate. Prosecutors said she planned, directed and escalated the attack.
At sentencing, Acting Supreme Court Justice Anthony S. Senft Jr. imposed life without parole, the mandatory punishment that followed Alvarenga’s first-degree murder conviction. The sentence means she cannot seek release through parole. Prosecutors said the punishment matched her role because she summoned others after the parking dispute, ordered them to remove Ortiz Ponce, told them to find him after he escaped, and directed the group to the church before the shooting.
The known record leaves several parts of the night clear and others less public. Prosecutors identified the places, vehicles and charges. They said surveillance captured the gas station abduction and that the Camaro was later found in Smithtown. Public accounts do not describe a long-standing dispute between Alvarenga and Ortiz Ponce. They also do not show that Ortiz Ponce did anything beyond parking and refusing to move his car before the attack began.
The case now stands as a completed homicide prosecution for Alvarenga, with guilty pleas already entered by Perdomo and the teen co-defendants. The next steps, if any, would come through appeals or other post-conviction filings. For prosecutors, the sentence closed the main case against the woman they said turned a parking dispute into a hunt across Bay Shore.
Author note: Last updated May 21, 2026.