Mexican professor sentenced for death of rapist in the U.S.

Norma Patricia Esparza, a well-known Mexican investigator, was sentenced to five and a half years in prison in the United States, for the killing of the man who raped her 20 years ago.

In January, EL UNIVERSAL featured her story. Norma Patricia is a psychologist working for the World Health Organization in Geneva and was arrested at a U.S. airport for the killing of the man, who raped her during her college years.

Norma Patricia was born in 1974 in El Taray, Aguascalientes, and was taken to the U.S. by her parents while she was still a child. They lived in Orange County, near Los Angeles and she had been abused by her father since the age of five.

In 1995, while in college, she was raped by Gonzalo Ramírez in her dorm room. Months later, her former boyfriend and three other people beat the man to death. Patricia saw it all and never revealed the truth.

That was her crime, according to the Orange County authorities.

On October 17, 2016, Patricia was on the way to a convention in the U.S. when she was arrested and placed in a small cell, with only an hour of sunlight allowed every day.

"My room never changes. Time is no longer time. I no longer have memories," she said five months ago, through a bulletproof window pane. ​Patricia will be taken to the Chowchilla prison.

Her family will ask Governor Jerry Brown for a change of jail because she has been threatened with death by the killers of her rapist if she reveals their identities.

Her husband is taking care of their daughter, but he is facing prostate cancer in the metastasis stage.