Graphic content, readers’ discretion advised. This story contains a recollection of crime and can be triggering to some readers discretion advised .
this is the moment that changes everything in a person’s life ,their nearest and dearest, the love of their life, fighting for breath on the floor.
this is deborah de pinto.
she was found unresponsive in the laundry room of a trailer park office in boulder colorado in june 2018.
her husband, scott jones ,was taken into the room by the first responders.
he was panicking.
44 year old deborah was in a serious condition.
she was taken to the nearest hosptial,but there she was pronounced dead and she hadn’t died of natural causes…
no ,this nightmares scenario wasn’t just a horrible accident.
instead the investigation following deborah’s death would unearth arguments,threats and a secret recording with two young kids caught in the middle of it who just lost their beloved mom .
featuring exlusive body cam footage.
this is the ttragic story of deborah de pinto
June 18th, 2018, boulder colorado
in the foothills of the rocky mountains,it’s a vibrant city with a lower violent crime rate then average across the US,picturesque and full of culture, some people view it as the ideal place to raise a family.
maybe deborah and her family had once thought so.their life in boulder was about to take a horrible turn….
this is what scott jones told the officers responding to his 911 call.
he said that deborah had fallen by accident in the laundry room of the office at the mobil home park.
where the family had temporarily been staying in a cramped travel trailer and initially any story including this story could have been the case.
in the chaos of first response the emergeny services priority is stabilizing a patient in critial condition they didn’t need to know how she got on the ground only what they could do to save her.
the paramedics needed to know if deborah was a drug user, so they could revive her if this was a possible overdose.
scott who’d been with his wife for 20 years said he didn’t know,he implied that she smoked some sort of illicit substance but he didn’t know what it was.
maybe this was understanable in the high stress of the situation his wife being resuscitated in the other room but it didn’t help.
deborah was transported to the hospital,there she was declared dead.
out of the reach of medical help it was now the police’s turn to do something for her to determine why and how she died.
the couple had two children, a daughter mary and a son, the son was only 10,both kids had been there in the trailer park on june 18th and so the cops face the harrowing task of interviewing the newly motherless children.
first ,they talked to mary.
mary painted a troubling picture of her parents’s marriage,it was already bad enough to have argued with yyour spouse on the last day of their life .
but what if it was related to her death…
and though this couple argued freuqently,this was worse than usual.
the police needed to know more about how this argument had started and what the family’s day had looked like before it all went so horribly wrong.
deborah was a chef in food services at the university of colorado boulder, a dedicacted mom with mouth to feed she worked a lot while scott tended to take care of the kids.
she’d left them alone with him while she went out to her shift not suspecting that she’d never go out to work ever again.
she got back in the late afternoon and that’s when she started to fight with scott….
the couple met in 1998 at a new year’s eve party,born in 1973 deborah had just turned 25 when she met scott who was 28 .
they were from opposite ends of the country,scott was from Dade county florida and had moved to colorado via north carolina.
meanwhile deborah went to high school in California but they hidded off right away.
they shared a love for horses and the colorado landscape and they soon settled down together.
devorah was dedicated to her work as a chef and she held multiple jobs over their time together, finally settling at the university of colorado in 2008.
scott however had a far more patchy record of employment,his primary role in their family was to look out for the kids.
they’d recently moved into the trailer park from a place in the mountains but the move was only temporary and they left their dogs their horses behind, maybe this was a benign change of scenery
or maybe it was a clue to deeper troubles threatening their longstanding relationship.
their seemed to have been strife between the two for several years.
in 2014,deborah shared a post on facebook saying:
with the caption ” you aint kidding “
while perhaps this was only a fun meme ,it seemed to suggest trouble to come.
so the police also talked to the couples previous neighbors back up in the mountains ,they didn’t have much good to say about scott.
deborah was definitely the bread winner, had this led to tensions in their relationship.was this what they’been arguing that fateful day when she came back from her long time tiring shift?
the neigbhors pointed the police to someone who might be able to shed more light on their dynamic.
one of scott’s old friends from high school a man named gardner ,sometimes they worked manual jobs together but these never lasted long.
gardner implied that scott was a man who lacked impulse control ,if he was mad about something you’d hear about it.
and maby not just hear it about it , it was scott the sort of man to do something violent about it too.
the question became most pressing when gardner talked about the couple’s relationship, and how they’d apparently been on the brink of splitting up for a long while.
at the start of june according to gardner scott and deborah had been separated, this was the reason
behind the move into the btrailer,that scott was moving out from living with deborah.
but on june 18th, the family had all been in the trailer park together,had they reconciled or where they about to reach breaking point ,gardner didn’t know.
gardner said that scott never vocalized any threats to deborah’s life but this wasn’t strict true …
a year erlier scott had been talking to one friend, when that friend asked him whay hed’d do if deborah left him.
clearly they were having meritable troubles even then ,and scott said” it wouldn’t happen that he wouldn’t let it happen”.
but what measures would he go to prevent it , he told another friend, if she tried to leave him :
” then i’ll whack her over the head and put her in the ground”
and only a week before her death he told someone else that he had friends that owed him favors and could have her taken out.
this treats were escalating and becoming more realistic, at the heart of it where scott’s possessiv tendencies, once when they were separated that same year she had a casual boyfriend over when scott arrived at the house, she told the boyfriend to hide in the armoa.
imagine you were trying to disentangle yourelf from a possessive controlling husband and he came to your house to find you with another man , you’d probably do the same.
but the incident suggested that she was afreaid of him ,this despite the fact that scott had their 10 year old son with him at the time, it seemed she didn’t think it mattered whether there was a child present, if scott was going to hurt her, he’d do it anyway.
he knew she was seeing another man, he sent her barrages of text messages often threatening.
in one he wrote;
” god isn’t happy with you committing adultary against me”
another said;
if you keep offending me, i will rebuke you just asthe lord will “
and most ominously a text from scott that read;
aint’ no cops or restraining order gonna stop what’s coming, i don’t care what happens to me at all, i’m a man with nothing left to lose exept my life, nothing left to lose.“
he had two kids but they didn’t seem to matter to him if he couldn’t keep a h old of his wife as well .
all signs pointed to a vicious escalation and deborah walked right into the path of his jealous rage when she came back from june 18th…
there son witnessed to the aftermath, scott ran to him that deborah wasn’t going to make it,imagine bringing your 10 year old son into the room where his mom lies dying or already dead .
what kind of father would do that , he was panicking yeas, but there was something more to it and this would be revealed by something scott hadn’t taken into account when he started the argument with deborah that day.
a string of recent neigbhor thefts ,had left the owner of the trailer park to fit it with a surveillance system.
this included a hidden camera in the trailer park office itself ,whatever had gone down between scott and deborah had been caught on camera and his lies would be reavealed
in this secret footage scott and debora can be seen coming into the trailer park office clearly in the middle of a heated argument.
they disappear into the laundry room out of view of the camera but not out of earshot .
deborah was tired from work, tired of fighting with her husband and just wanted to get her laundry done so she could get out of there.
but this wasn’t an ordinary argument like all the others …
they had been together for 20 years, scott had spent at least some of that time trying to controll her and when she told him to get away from her something snapped.
he couldn’t leave her in the laundry room.
this awful sound was the sound deborah made when scott laid his hands on her when he startted to strangel her.
her life partner the father of her children attacked her , in a horrible betrayal,it was an attempt at exercising control over her for the final time, then it was over .
and deborah lay unresponsive on the floor and scott realized what he’d done, he spent the next 47 minutes in the laundry room with her , not calling for help even the fog of rage must have lifted.
no , insted he was planning how he could cover up what he’d done.
the plan he settled on using his 10 years old son as a coverstory, he went to the boy and told him something had happened to his mom .
perhaps in scott’s twisted imagination he thought this would exonerate him,why would he show his son his murder victim if he’d killed her?but he had.
with deborah declared dead the hospital had to work out her cause of death, in an autopsy the forensic pathologist determined she died of homicide asphixiation.
but the police already suspected foul play
the day of her death,the kids were taken by child protective services and scott was brought to the sheriff’s departement, during his interview he maintained what he told the first responders ,that deborah had suffered some sort of medical issue.
and even though their kids had witness them arguing he maintained that their relationship was going to be okay.
scott still believed that he was going to get away with it but the officers knew that deborah’s death was suspicious and that scott had been the only person in that room with her.
they dug deeper.
scott was still denying it , it was later that night that the police department would receive the evidence they needed to confirm what he’d done.
the manager of the trailer park rang the police with the secret surveillance footage and scott’s guilt seemed assured.
they showed this footage to scott .
they were close to nailing him for the murder,in this interview footage he can be seen getting increasingly worked up as he knows he’s edging closer to being caught .
so he asked for his lawyer, but a lawyer isn’t a miracle worker.
the police had him dead to rights and the lawyer must have known that , because few hours later scott confessed, and worse he tried to justify what he done.
according to outside witnesses it was scott who’ made deborah’s life a living hell but according to scott it was the oposite.
he made deborah out to be a cruel person, who’d driven him to murder.
scott was charged with murder, and he seemed to accept what he’d done, perhaps it felt good to get it off his chest, he seemed to be conserned about his kids most of all.
despite what he’d said to deborah in a text a few weeks earlier that he had nothing to lose.
i want to see my kids again . i wont lose them . i don’t won’t to lose them forever “
but he’d killed their mom ,there could be no getting them back.
when he was being driven away from the police departement. he expressed his regrets.
but was this regret genuine?
a few months later he made a phone call from prison ,these phone calls are recoded though inmates often forget this fact.
over the phone he said ” she made it all go down”most likely refering to deborah.
he also wrote a letter to a son he had from a previous relationship, writing;
now she is in jell i bet she is a believier now ,oh well too late, something tells me debbeie doesn’t think i’m a punk anymore.”
the letter ended ;i bet she is sorry for being a lying, cheating deceitful a****, now i bet she knows i was a good man now too late now.”
this painted a very different picture to his regrets expressed to the officers in the squad car,now instead he was almost gleeful about what he done.
his trial took place in december 2019, the defense presented no witnesses.
but it still took 10 hours for the jury to come to a verdict , all but one jury members were convinced of his guilt with one hold out.
but the conflict was only between first and second degree murder.
the difference between the two verdicts was whether scott had planned to kill deborah or done uit on the spur of the moment.
the threatening texts and statements to his friends implied the former, though his interviews made it seem that he’d killed her on impuls and ultimately the jury were convinced of the latter.
they found scott jones guilty of second deegree murder as well as one count of child abuse for bringing his young son into the room to see his dying mom.
he was sentenced to 48 years in prison,the maximum sentence allowed for the charges of second degree murder.
he was also sentenced for one year on the count of child abuse and a emotion was granted preventing him from having any contact with his and deborah’s kids to protect their mental and emotional
well- being.
the children are now being raised by deborah’s family out of state while scott remains in prison.