The man whose carjacking attempt led to the fatal shooting of an Orange County woman in 2021 was sentenced to life in prison Monday after nearly two years of procedural delays over his conviction.
Jordan Robinson was 21 at the time 36-year-old Roxana Sanchez was killed after midnight the day before Mother’s Day in the driveway outside her east Orlando home.
Investigators said Robinson was behind the wheel when he and then-17-year-old Ja’Quarius McCray pulled in behind the car driven by Sanchez’s friend as she was dropping her off after a night out. The two approached both sides of the car and demanded they get out.
McCray, investigators said, fired into the vehicle after the driver instead reversed into Robinson’s car, striking Sanchez, a mother of two boys, in the back of the head. McCray pleaded guilty to killing her in 2023 and was sentenced to a 40-year prison term.
On Monday, Robinson met a similar fate. In court, shackled and in an Orange County corrections jumpsuit, he listened from the jury box as Sanchez’s sister, Yahaira Viado, and her husband, Douglas Mejia, pleaded with Circuit Judge Michael Kraynick to impose the maximum sentence for her murder.
“She was a daughter, a wife, a mother, and our family has been forever changed by her absence,” Viado said. “No sentence can truly repair the loss that we live with every single day.”
It took almost two years for Robinson’s case to be closed, as he initially launched an unsuccessful attempt at withdrawing his no-contest plea to second-degree murder just days after he was first handed his life sentence.
But the court also found that he hadn’t undergone a pre-sentence investigation as a first-time felony offender, which is required by Florida law as a way of seeking factors that may mitigate a defendant’s sentence.
Mejia, who had spoken at Robinson’s first sentencing hearing in 2024, reiterated his call for a life sentence. He and Sanchez began dating shortly after they met in 2003. By 2005, they were married and later had two children.
This year would have marked 23 years since they’d been together.
“The moment he decided to follow the car, the car that was not hers while she was sitting in the passenger seat, marked her for death,” Mejia said. “I ask you to show no mercy, like he didn’t show mercy to my wife.”
Before he was sentenced, Robinson apologized to Sanchez’s family as they sat in the gallery, explaining his actions at the time as the result of being “young, immature, insecure and desperate to find a place to belong because I didn’t have the courage to be a leader.”
In addition to second-degree murder, he was convicted of attempted first-degree murder of the driver and attempted armed carjacking as part of his plea agreement.
“I don’t expect y’alls forgiveness for what I did to y’all, but I humbly ask for it,” Robinson said. “I pray that y’all may find peace.”