A second suspect accused in the fatal shooting of his former friend and theft of his diamond jewelry in a plot that involved placing a tracking device on the victim’s car and tracing it to his Bronx home, has been arrested more than a year after the crime, police said on Wednesday.
Welfy Espinal, 25, and Lenyn Toribio, 27, were charged in a federal indictment unsealed in June with interstate stalking resulting in death for the shocking slay of 24-year-old Jeremy Ortega in April 2025.
At the time, Espinal was in police custody, but Toribio was still on the loose. Detectives picked up Toribio on Wednesday in the Bronx around 3:30 p.m. on charges of attempted murder and attempted manslaughter, police said.
Espinal is charged with murder, manslaughter, and criminal possession of a firearm.
Investigators traced the killers’ scheme back to March 28, 2025, the day Toribio activated a GPS tracking device that Espinal placed under the victim’s car a few days later, Manhattan U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton said at Espinal’s indictment in June.
The pair used the device to track the victim the following day to an Upper Manhattan nightclub, where they observed Jeremy wearing diamond-studded jewelry.
Theodore Parisienne / New York Daily News
A 24yr old man was pronounced dead at Jacobi Hospital after he was shot twice in the chest outside of 226 Quincy Avenue in the Bronx on Sunday April 13, 2025. 0821. (Theodore Parisienne / New York Daily News)
On April 12, 2025, the suspects followed Jeremy to a Midtown restaurant, then drove to Throggs Neck to surveil the neighborhood where they planned to rob him later that night, circling the block around Jeremy’s home for roughly 10 minutes, court documents say. The pair then left, switched vehicles, and returned about an hour before Jeremy arrived home. When they spotted their target, the suspects chased him down, shot him multiple times, and stole a bag containing the victim’s diamond jewelry, Clayton said.
“I saw everything,” the victim’s mother, Yokasta Ortega, told the Daily News in June. “I was yelling, ‘Please don’t kill my son, please don’t kill my son!’”
The bereaved mother said she had unlocked her home’s front door for her son, who had forgotten his keys, and went upstairs to await his return. When she didn’t hear him enter, she glanced outside to see Jeremy attempting to flee his attackers.
“Once I realized he was running, I ran straight downstairs and then that’s when I saw Welfy shooting him from behind,” Yokasta said. “It was terrible.”
Jeremy’s sister, Brianna Ortega, said Espinal was an old friend of her brother’s from high school and that the killer was once welcome in their home.
Espinal “would do everything with Jeremy growing up,” said Brianna, 19. “They would ride around in the car together. They would go play basketball … They would do a lot of stuff together.”
Brianna Ortega said Toribio met Jeremy a few years earlier through Espinal.