A D.C. man convicted of killing his girlfriend while her 7-year-old son slept nearby was sentenced to 27 years in prison on Friday.
Darnell Sterling, 57, was previously found guilty of second degree murder, among other charges, in the 2020 killing of his 34-year-old girlfriend, Olga Ooro.
Ooro was reported missing a few days after the couple returned from a date in 2020. Another tenant of Ooro’s apartment building discovered her 7-year-old son wandering the halls, sobbing and asking for his mom.
Prosecutors say Sterling killed Ooro inside her Northwest D.C. apartment while her son was asleep, cleaned up the crime scene, hid her body and left. He returned the next day to retrieve her body from the hidden location and transported it to a secondary site that has yet to be uncovered.
At the time of Ooro’s disappearance, Sterling was under a protective court order stemming from a domestic abuse incident with Ooro in April 2020. Sterling was arrested July 23, 2020, and has been in custody since then.
Sterling also faces five years of supervision after his release.