'Don't scream': Stabbing victim testifies in Fort Collins murder trial

Sara Mondragon’s world was black.

On a frigid night in February 2016, she lay on her stomach on the wood floor of her Fort Collins bedroom, numb and bleeding from multiple stab wounds. She couldn’t move or see.

Then her 2-year-old daughter grabbed her hand.

“I wasn’t numb anymore as soon as I felt her little hand,” Mondragon said through tears Thursday before a jury at the Larimer County Justice Center. “She kept telling me, ‘Come on, Mom.’”

Mondragon, star witness in the murder trial of 27-year-old Tolentino Corzo-Avendano, entered the room in a wheelchair and limped to the stand clutching a cane. Attorneys asked her to recount the night she said plays in her head like a movie on repeat: the night she said Corzo-Avendano stabbed her and killed her grandmother, 61-year-old Kathy Mondragon.

Corzo-Avendano will likely face life in prison if he is found guilty of first-degree murder. His co-defendant, 43-year-old Tomas Vigil, took a plea deal in September and testified against Corzo-Avendano to secure a 10- to 24-year sentence for the part he played in the events.

The plea deal whittled Vigil's 20 charges, which included first-degree murder, to a single count of first-degree burglary. In his testimony last week, he recounted smoking meth with Corzo-Avendano multiple times before driving him to the Mondragon home.

He said he never touched Sara or Kathy Mondragon.​

​​​​​​Corzo-Avendano’s defense has argued Vigil was responsible for the assault and murder, linking the crime to a complicated drug dispute that Eighth Judicial District Judge Julie Kunce Field declared largely out of bounds for the trial. 

But Sara Mondragon said she has no doubts about who stabbed her.

“Tino,” she said repeatedly when asked to clarify who hurt her and killed her grandmother, using the nickname of her former boyfriend. She said she identified Corzo-Avendano as her assailant when she called 911 and when Fort Collins Police Detective Dan Calahan interviewed her in a hospital room days after the attack.

The night was winding down like any other, Mondragon recalled. After Mondragon’s cleaning shift with Merry Maids, she and her grandmother had gone Valentine’s Day shopping and returned to the home they shared on 1623 Stover St.

Mondragon was relaxing on her bed with her daughter, watching “Sofia the First” on TV. She said her grandmother was asleep in the home’s second bedroom. At about 10 or 11 p.m., the restless 2-year-old finally started to fall asleep.

Then Mondragon’s cell phone started ringing.

It was Corzo-Avendano, Mondragon said. Former classmates at Lincoln Middle School, the two had later reconnected on Facebook and dated for about six months until January 2016, when police led Corzo-Avendano from Mondragon’s home in handcuffs. Fort Collins Police had arrested him on drug- and driving-related charges.

Corzo-Avendano liked to stop by Mondragon’s home late at night, much to her grandmother’s exasperation, Mondragon said. He’d lived with the two for a while but quickly “overstepped his welcome” by failing to pay rent, going through Kathy Mondragon’s things and ringing the doorbell repeatedly in the early hours of the morning, Sara Mondragon said.

Corzo-Avendano kept calling until Mondragon answered. He told her he was coming over, she recalled. When Mondragon came to the door, her ex-boyfriend was standing there with a tattooed man Mondragon said she’d never seen before, later identified as Vigil.

“We’re gonna take some stuff,” she recalled Corzo-Avendano saying as he “pushed his way in.”

Mondragon said Corzo-Avendano got angry when she asked him what he wanted. He demanded that she give him her cell phone and pull up the number he’d been calling from, she said, then dialed the number and spoke to someone in Spanish. Then he ordered Vigil – the tattooed man – to “go tie her up,” Mondragon said.

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Mondragon thought Corzo-Avendano was talking about her. Then Corzo-Avendano started hitting her, she said.

“I just remember him on top of me, punching me in my face,” she said.

She said she knew right away that something was broken. She could taste blood.

“Don’t scream, and I won’t hurt (your daughter),” she recalled her attacker saying before he covered her mouth with a gloved hand.

Vigil stood silently in the dark living room, doing nothing as Corzo-Avendano beat her, Mondragon said. She said she never saw Vigil enter her grandmother's room.

She said she managed to break away from Corzo-Avendano and run to her room to check on her daughter. Mondragon caught a glimpse of her own bloody reflection in a mirror.

“Be good. I love you,” she told her daughter, who was sitting on the bed.

Corzo-Avendano tore into the room and started yelling, “What did you do, Sara? What did you do?”

Mondragon tried to calm him down, but it was no use, she said. The attacker pulled a knife from his pocket and stabbed her as her daughter cried.

Then he was gone again. Mondragon heard banging noises from her grandmother’s room down the hall. She began pounding on her bedroom wall, hoping to get her neighbor’s attention. She remembers a tall figure with a flashlight cracking open her door twice and peeking in.

But then the light was gone, and Corzo-Avendano was back, Mondragon said. She detailed him getting her on the bed and stabbing her, hitting her left eye. When she fell to the floor, she said he stabbed her in the back.

Cartoons played in the background as Mondragon’s daughter cried and screamed. Mondragon saw her daughter’s body fly against the closet door.

“He threw her,” Mondragon said in the court room, sobbing. “She came up to me and said, ‘Mommy, my head hurts. I need a Band-Aid.’”

That’s when Mondragon’s world went black – until her daughter grabbed her hand.

She said she knew she had to get to the phone, but she couldn’t stand up. So she crawled from the room on her stomach, slipping on the blood-soaked floorboards and pushing her weight against anything sturdy and solid she could find.

Her daughter wouldn’t leave her side. When they got to the living room, the toddler brought her mother the phone and Mondragon dialed 911.

As the sirens approached, Mondragon heard someone run down the hall, jump over her body and dash out the door. When the police came, she remembers “how beautiful and amazing that was. I thought I might not make it.”

Mondragon was in the hospital for two months. She’s paralyzed on her left side and lost her left eye. Walking is a triumph – and a struggle. She was guided into and out of the court room in a wheelchair on Thursday.

A stroke related to the attack took away most of the vision in her right eye. She can see colors and shapes but few details.

But she had no trouble identifying Corzo-Avendano in the court room Thursday. He sat feet away from her, silent and moving only to scribble notes during her testimony.

“Sara, is that the man that stabbed you and hurt your grandma?” prosecutor Emily Humphrey said, motioning to Corzo-Avendano. “Is there any doubt in your mind that he — “

“No,” Mondragon interrupted.

Corzo-Avendano's trial will continue Monday after a Friday recess. Closing statements will likely come early next week, followed by jury deliberation and a verdict.