The murder trial for the two men accused of murdering St. Cloud mother Nicole Montalvo continues today.
Montalvo’s accused killers are her estranged husband, 33-year-old Christopher Otero-Rivera, and father-in-law, 64-year-old Angel Luis Rivera.
The state called Nicholas Rivera, the brother and son of the suspects on Wednesday.
Nicholas Rivera testified that on the day his sister-in-law went missing, he went outside his parents’ St. Cloud home, where he was living, and heard a loud noise and saw someone washing off a cart.
I remember seeing my father,” Rivera said. “I believe he was washing something.”
Prosecutors questioned Rivera more about what he saw his dad using to wash the cart.
“I believe the hose, yes,” Rivera said.
While investigating Montalvo’s murder, Nicholas Rivera, 30, was named a person of interest in the case and was extradited to Florida from Georgia on multiple counts of child pornography unrelated to the murder.
Nicholas Rivera in August was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 15 years of probation after his release as part of a deal he reached with prosecutors and was listed as a witness for the prosecution at the time.
The high-profile case has horrified many in Osceola County since October 2019, when some of Montalvo’s remains were unearthed at Angel Rivera’s St. Cloud home, where Otero-Rivera also lived. The discovery came just days after the woman dropped off the couple’s young son at the house on Hixon Avenue.
“Nicole was killed and her body was cut into pieces and then buried by Angel and Christopher,” according to the arrest affidavit from the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office.
The father and son are being tried together but have separate attorneys. They are charged with second-degree murder, abuse of a body and evidence tampering in her death.
The State Attorney’s Office recently dropped its case against Wanda Rivera, Montalvo’s mother-in-law, who had been accused of helping dispose of her car. The 61-year-old woman had faced charges of accesory to murder after the fact, evidence tampering and providing false information to law enforcement.
However, shortly after she was arrested this summer, prosecutors released a report from the Sheriff’s Office showing surveillance footage that put Angel Rivera’s 1992 Chevrolet truck on the path from his house to Big Sky Boulevard, where her car was found abandoned shortly after she disappeared.
A judge in 2016 granted Montalvo a restraining order against Otero-Rivera. In her petition, she wrote that after coming home with their young son he had smacked her so hard she bled and then dragged her to their bedroom by the hair.
“This isn’t the first time it happen[ed] but this is the worst time,” she wrote.
By 2018, the violence seemed to have escalated, when Montalvo told Sheriff’s Office investigators that Otero-Rivera took her to an isolated location where he and another woman assaulted her.
According to the arrest affidavit, Otero-Rivera slapped her repeatedly, threw her to the ground, tried to gag her, robbed her and then tried to break her neck before letting her go.
While deputies were interviewing Montalvo, St. Cloud police found Otero-Rivera and Toni Rocker together in a car around the corner from Montalvo’s home.
Otero-Rivera in July pleaded no contest to hindering a witness’ ability to communicate with law enforcement, unlawful possession of a credit or debit card and battery. Charges of kidnapping, robbery and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon were dropped in the deal.
He was sentenced to a short stint in jail, followed by two years of supervised probation.
