'No sentence long enough': Sister speaks at sentencing for brutal murder of her teen brother

SALT LAKE CITY — The older sister of Ivan Nickolas "Nick" Vetecnik told the man who murdered him that she and her family are serving a life sentence of grief and trauma since the teenager's brutal death.

She said she was "locked in" on Rowdy Lee Aguilar at his sentencing hearing on Friday and wanted him to "feel every single word."

"What you destroyed is not replaceable. What you took from him cannot be measured," Samantha VanTreese said in her victim impact statement.

Aguilar, 22, of Taylorsville, was sentenced to a term of 25 years to life in prison for aggravated murder, a first-degree felony, although he will begin his sentence in a juvenile detention center.

She said two years before her brother's death, he lost both of his parents.

"We were already a broken family trying to hold onto each other just to survive that pain. And my brother — a 15-year-old child — was trying to rebuild his life," VanTreese said. "He didn't deserve to have his future taken on top of everything he had already lost."

Nick, of Taylorsville, was killed on May 26, 2021. Security video from Aguilar's home shows he and Nick arrived around 10 a.m. At 1:20 p.m., Aguilar entered his home again alone with his shirt "heavily stained with blood" a statement from the Salt Lake County District Attorney's Office said. About 20 minutes later, a business security camera captured Aguilar, then 17, carrying items that looked like garbage bags to the location in a nearby field where bags with dismembered body parts were discovered.

As a sister, VanTreese said she was there for her brother when he needed guidance, but instead of helping him recover from the trauma of losing his parents, his life ended "in the most violent and terrifying way imaginable."

She described him as a "goofy, soft-hearted, trusting" child who wanted connection and family, and he believed Aguilar cared about him until Aguilar betrayed him.

"There is no sentence long enough, no vocabulary deep enough, to capture what it is like to lose a 15-year-old child, a brother, a boy who still had his whole future in front of him in such a violent, intentional and gruesome way," she said.

VanTreese said every day she wakes up into the reality that her brother is gone along with the future they imagined together. She said the details of his death — that he was stabbed 26 times in the back of his head and his body was dismembered — live in her mind each day and are part of trauma she carries with her.

"I will never stop wondering if he was scared, if he cried out, if he realized that the person who claimed to be his friend had become the person who decided he didn't deserve to live," she said.

VanTreese told Aguilar his prison sentence will not compare to the one her family has.

"I ask that the sentence reflect the truth — that a child's life was brutally taken, that he deserved protection and that the choices made by the defendant created harm that will last generations," she said.

VanTreese shared her statement with KSL the day after the sentencing, and said reading the words in the courtroom lifted a weight off her chest.

She said Aguilar's comments during the sentencing hearing were "huge" to her. During previous hearings he showed no emotion or was laughing, but Friday was different, she said. He cried and apologized for being a monster and snake and told the family that Nick did not do anything to him to provoke his actions.

"Just seeing his raw emotion helped," VanTreese said, noting that he was crying.

VanTreese said she still doesn't know why Aguilar killed her brother and probably never will. When his case comes before the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole years from now, she plans to be there.

Aguilar will remain in juvenile detention until he is 25, when he will be transferred to prison, according to the sentence.

Related topics