Men sentenced in ASU student’s 2010 murder

See the original article here: http://www.walb.com/story/19828044/men-sentenced-in-asu-students-2010-murder

Posted: Oct 15, 2012 9:28 PM Updated: Nov 20, 2013 12:27 PM

By Karla Navarrete
PHOENIX (CBS5) –

Both men have now been sentenced in the death of an Arizona State University student.

Judge Warren Granville sentenced Marion Patterson to 17 years in prison for second-degree murder in a plea deal.

Earlier this month, Judge Karen O’Conner sentenced Louis Harper to life in prison on the first-degree murder charge with the possibility of parole after 25 years.

In the armed robbery, Harper was sentenced to 15 years in prison, to be served consecutively.

Harper pleaded guilty to the charges last month.

On Oct. 17, 2010, Arizona State University student Zachary Marco was murdered as he was walking home from the library.

“He had straight ‘As.’ He was the hardest working kid I’ve ever known. That night he was at the library, probably 10 hours. He was walking home, carrying his laptop,” said his father, Daniel Marco, to CBS 5 News from his law office in downtown Mesa.

Harper and Patterson were both apprehended days after the murder in 2010. Patterson had a plea deal earlier this year in exchange for giving details of the triggerman.

Daniel Marco told CBS 5 News there is not a day or a moment that goes by without remembering his son, who was a page at the Arizona Senate, an honor student at ASU and was Washington-bound for an internship in politics.

“What the passage of time does is that it allows scar tissue to form to be able to function, but the pain is still there,” Marco said. “This is, to me, the best way to describe what we’ve gone through.”