This Utah man once tried to strangle a woman he’s now accused of killing. Lawmakers cut funding for an exam to assess risk in such cases.

Nearly four years ago, experts could have seen the signs that Ricardo Trujillo Rojel may one day kill the mother of his children. They were as clear as the red marks officers saw around the woman’s neck.

In June 2021, Mayra Catalan-Dimas was 19 and a few months pregnant with her and Ricardo Trujillo Rojel’s first child when she woke up around 2 a.m. to Trujillo Rojel choking her and accusing her of cheating on him, according to charging documents.

“I know what you were doing,” the woman recalled Trujillo Rojel saying. She told officers, who noted the neck marks and blood on her shirt, that she didn’t know what he was talking about, according to a probable cause statement. She’d been with him all day.

Trujillo Rojel was ultimately arrested and charged with felony counts of aggravated assault and kidnapping, but he later pleaded guilty to lesser charges. After struggling for a year to find a mental health and substance misuse course, he completed a treatment program in Ogden.

His name didn’t show up in Utah court dockets for any serious crimes for years — until January, when he was arrested for allegedly breaking Catalan-Dimas’ bedroom window, later getting inside and tearing photos off a wall. An officer wrote that police found meth and a pipe in Trujillo Rojel’s pocket.

Then, last month, prosecutors allege Trujillo Rojel did exactly the thing experts could have predicted: He killed her — and became the subject of a statewide Amber Alert when, police say, he fled with their children. He was later arrested in Utah County with the kids, who were unharmed, the same day the alert went out.

A ‘mind-boggling’ move not to fund exams

Attempted strangulation, like Trujillo Rojel was accused of nearly four years ago, is a particularly high-risk indicator of future violence. It’s why Utah lawmakers have allocated hundreds of thousands of dollars to strangulation exams since 2022.

The exams can show a person was choked even if there aren’t outward signs, and the state money reimbursed the law enforcement agencies that performed them. A year later, lawmakers also passed a bill that required first responders to perform lethality assessment screenings, meant to help determine how likely a person accused of domestic violence may escalate and kill their partner.

Mayra Catalan-Dimas’s 2021 case unfolded before the strangulation exams were funded. And after June 30, the next person choked in a domestic violence case may not get a forensic strangulation screening, either.

That’s because Utah lawmakers this year didn’t approve the money that many agencies and hospitals rely on for the costly tests. The $260,000 ask amounted to about a fourth of a percentage point of the $97 million income tax break approved this year.

Trujillo Rojel’s alleged escalation culminated March 24, when he and Catalan-Dimas were moving out of their Riverdale trailer, a witness told police.

Officers were called to the home that day for a fire. When they arrived, one peered inside its open front door to see Catalan-Dimas lying near the doorway, severely burned with a bloody stab wound to her neck, charging documents state.

Fire investigators determined the blaze was intentionally set; they found gas on the kitchen counter. When Trujillo Rojel was later arrested, he told investigators he had gotten into an argument with Catalan-Dimas, hit her, squeezed her neck until she passed out on the floor, then lit the fire and left with their kids, the documents state. He also told police he stabbed her, then threw the knife out of his car.

The Legislature’s decision to no longer fund reimbursements for roughly 210 strangulation exams that the appropriation would have covered undermines the work lawmakers did two years ago in requiring lethality assessments, the Utah Domestic Violence Coalition said in a news release.

Though the Criminal Justice Appropriations Subcommittee unanimously approved the coalition’s request this year for continued funding, the Executive Appropriations Committee chose not to.

Erin Jemison, the coalition’s director of public policy, struggled to describe how the decision made her feel.

“Since we’re talking about violence, I shouldn’t say it, but it felt like a gut punch on that last meeting where the budget list came out, to not see it added in there,” she said. “We were just shocked. It’s truly mind-boggling.”

Trujillo Rojel’s attorney, reached Monday, declined to provide a comment to The Salt Lake Tribune.

Common but ‘often invisible’ abuse

Domestic violence cases are among the most common cases that Utah authorities investigate. And yet, they do not have high rates of convictions.

That’s because they’re often complicated, involving a kind of macabre balancing test between a victim’s wants, what the law says and what investigators can prove, said Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill.

Strangulation is a common aggravating factor in many of these cases, but injuries from attempted strangulation are “often invisible,” according to the Utah Domestic Violence Coalition. These strangulation exams can uncover unseen signs of this abuse, which can then be used to provide medical care and support a domestic violence prosecution.

In 2017, advocates successfully lobbied for a bill that made strangulation a felony, and Utah joined most other states in upping the potential penalty for someone found guilty of this telling sort of violence.

“That’s helpful,” Jemison said. But it’s less helpful “if you don’t have evidence around it, because it sometimes is not immediately obvious, like when they take photos at a scene, sometimes marks haven’t shown up yet.”

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These tests can also sometimes take the pressure off a victim who fears retribution for coming forward about the abuse. In those cases, the exam can say what the victim can’t, Jemison said.

“And so being able to have the full evidence collection kit done is really important,” Jemison said.

Now, the organization is looking at outside funding to bridge the gap left by the Legislature. It’s not ideal, Jemison conceded, but neither is needing to ask the state each year for funding that her coalition can then dole out.

“Long term, it should live in a different state agency. It should not be a cost that individual law enforcement departments or prosecutors have to bear,” she said. “It really should be a state government cost, just like rape kits are.”

‘Tragic, painful realities’

It’s unclear how or if a strangulation exam would have changed the outcome of Trujillo Rojel’s 2021 domestic violence case. Gill said it’s a “yes and no” answer.

He told The Tribune that prosecutors were juggling Catalan-Dimas’ “adamant” desire that her partner not be incarcerated for a long time — and that he instead get access to resources for substance misuse and mental health — with the severity of his alleged crimes, the number of witnesses and his relative lack of criminal history.

“If I have a bystander witness, rather than the victim themselves, that makes my case a lot easier. Having and gathering as much forensic evidence as we can, that makes the case easier,” he said.

“But the victim also plays a role in the conversation, because we know, more often than not, the perpetrator and the victim are still going to come together,” Gill continued. “They’re still going to continue to have a relationship.”

He said prosecutors don’t have “crystal ball” for what an offender may one day do. “All we can do is to hopefully shape that and minimize that violence, or to eliminate it,” he said.

In this case, the outcome was neither, one of the “tragic, painful realities that confront us as a society and us as prosecutors,” Gill said.

Gill advocated for better investigations — and funding for them — but also to provide resources sooner, such emotional and financial support to leave abusers.

In her obituary, Catalan-Dimas’ mother mourned the loss of the 23-year-old, telling her friends “the world just lost a little of its humor and charm.”

She described her daughter as “a force of nature,” always ready with “witty quip or generous gesture” — whatever the moment called for.

“Mayra Cecilia had an insatiable zest for life, a love of anime that makes us seem like casual viewers, and,” she wrote, “a passion for swinging so high in the park that we often feared she would simply fly away.”

Her mother wrote that Catalan-Dimas’ greatest accomplishments were her two children.

Trujillo Rojel is facing one count each of first-degree felony aggravated murder and aggravated arson, according to charging documents. He appeared at his first in-person court appearance at Ogden’s 2nd District courthouse last week.

— Tribune staff writer Jose Davila IV contributed to this story.