A woman was arrested after trying to hire a hit man to kill two witnesses who testified against her teenage son, who was convicted in the stabbing death of a man during a 5-year-old’s birthday party, Palm Beach County deputies said Tuesday.
Josefina Cardona-Cardona, 43, blamed the witnesses for her son’s imprisonment and is accused of trying to hire a man to kill them, according to her arrest report. What she did not know, the report says, was that the man she thought was a killer-for-hire was an undercover agent.
Her son, 16-year-old Manuel Marcos Cardona, from Lake Worth, pleaded guilty in February to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 15 years in prison in the 2022 killing, court records show. Palm Beach deputies say Manuel, then 14, stabbed 19-year-old Andres Perez-Alvarado during a brawl at the birthday party. He died the next day at the hospital.
