Boyfriend's Strangulation Of Arvada Woman Gets 32-Year Sentence

GOLDEN, CO – A judge sentenced a man to prison time on Thursday who was found guilty of strangling his girlfriend in 2016 and causing permanent damage to her brain.

Thomas Adam Rojas, 35, was sentenced to prison for 32 years for a strangulation assault on his girlfriend in Arvada, the Jefferson County District Attorney's Office said Friday.

On Dec. 6, 2016 Rojas and 36-year-old Felicia Garcia lived together with Rojas’s mother in the 7200 block of West 64th Avenue in Arvada when Rojas assaulted Garcia, held her down, sitting on her chest, and strangled her with two hands, prosecutors said. The strangulation caused the "dissection of her carotid artery and a subsequent stroke, which caused severe aphasia, affecting her ability to speak or report what happened to her," the DA's office said in a statement.

It was three days before anyone called 911.

At the time, Rojas was on parole for a 2010 incident in which he had strangled another girlfriend into unconsciousness, police said.

A Jefferson County jury in January found Rojas guilty of attempted first-degree murder and first-degree assault.

“Mr. Rojas deserves to serve every day of this sentence for the unspeakable assault on Felicia," said Jefferson County District Attorney Pete Weir said in a statement. "To choke a woman with his bare hands demands nothing less. Strangulation is a tool of violence. It can be a fatal tool of violence. In this case, Felicia Garcia survived, but she will never be the same.”

Rojas was arrested in December, 2016 and has been held in the Jefferson County jail on no bail.

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