STEVENS POINT, Wis. (WSAU) -- The man convicted of murdering a Plover woman is dead. 33-year-old Jose Luis Flores Aca pled guilty June 27th to first-degree homicide and first-degree sexual assault with great bodily harm for the strangulation death of his neighbor, Jamie Koch. Portage County Sheriff John Charewicz says Flores Aca died the same way Sunday night. “Last night at 11 o’ clock, corrections officers made their rounds, checked everybody. Immediately after the 11 o’clock check, an inmate attached a device to the wall, strung a two-inch strip of bedsheet around that device and his neck, and strangled himself.”
Charewicz says Flores Aca was somehow able to obtain a small, ordinary piece of hardware into the jail. “It was a two-inch screw, and we’re doing our best to track down how he came into possession of this because it’s nothing that matches anything that we use in the jail for securing anything.”
The sheriff says an outside agency is conducting the investigation into Flores Aca’s death. “The Stevens Point Police Department is investigating the death. The coroner is on his way to Madison right now for an autopsy.”
There are procedures that jailers follow to ensure the safety of inmates and officers in the jail. Charewicz says they immediately checked to make sure corrections officers did what they were supposed to do. “The jail administrator came in at 11:30, right after the incident happened, and checked all of the tapes and checked the logs for the corrections officers when they make their rounds, and saw that everything was in order and there really wasn’t anything that we could have to prevent this death given the type of jail that we have and the fact that we don’t have eyes on people 24-hours a day.”
Jose Luis Flores Aca was scheduled to be sentenced for murder September 30th before Portage County Judge Thomas Flugaur. Flores Aca was facing a life sentence.
Charewicz says they had no indication he may try to hurt himself. “There were no outward indications that this gentleman was even thinking of suicide, or we would have had him in a holding cell where we would have had eyes on him 24-7.”
Aca strangled 36-year-old Jamie Koch to death August 6th, 2013 at the building where they both had separate apartments. He then placed her body in Koch’s car and drove her to a Waupaca county farm field. That’s where Flores Aca set fire to the car in an attempt to dispose of Koch’s body.