Andrew Avila, of Elmont, is sentenced to 25 years in prison for strangling Rebecca Carlson, a Hempstead mother, on Valentine's Day 

The Elmont man who strangled a sex worker on Valentine’s Day in 2023 and then dumped her body behind a car parts shop will spend the next 25 years behind bars for his “despicable act,” a Nassau County judge ruled on Thursday morning.

Andrew Avila, 26, pleaded guilty in April to first-degree manslaughter for killing Rebecca Carlson, 39, a Hempstead mother of two who had turned to prostitution after struggling with painkiller addiction, authorities said.

Avila and Carlson met up through a website that connects sex workers with clients and agreed to meet in Mineola on Feb. 14 for a tryst, according to prosecutors. When Carlson refused to engage in additional acts beyond what Avila had paid for, he became angry and violent, ultimately choking her to death in his car.

Avila sat with her lifeless body in the car until he became spooked by a passerby and drove to South Hempstead where he removed her clothes and dumped her body next to the garbage behind the Advanced Auto Parts shop on Grand Avenue, authorities said. Her body was found the next morning.

At Avila’s sentencing hearing on Thursday in Nassau County Court, family members remembered Carlson as a bright, bubbly woman in the grip of drug addiction.

“Rebecca was always full of fun, a practical joker, an infectious giggle and laugh, a generous, loving heart, affectionate, nonjudgmental and so very compassionate,” her mother Trish said in a letter read in court by prosecutor Daryl Levy.

Her mother said that after gallbladder surgery she was prescribed a “generous dose of Percocet” which led to her addiction.

Even as Carlson's world declined and she turned to sex work, her family said that she retained that compassionate and loving spirit that they had known her by.

“Although now assimilated into the world of drugs and the places that she had to live,” her mother wrote with other family members in a letter to the judge. “The traits that made her such a wonderful woman and such a gift to all who knew her, remained intact no matter her life circumstances.”

Her family also spoke about the deep pain they feel from her loss and the tragedy that she will not be around for her daughters Amber, 12, and Destiny, 23.

“She will never help her daughters get ready for their weddings or graduations, she will never get to hold her grandchildren,” Carlson’s cousin Hilary Louidice told the court.

Avila, who was looking down throughout the hearing, said nothing. His lawyer Christopher Devane said that his client was in a “dark place” when he killed Carlson and now feels “deeply sorrowful for what took place.”

He asked the judge to consider his client's guilty plea as a mitigating factor for his punishment.

Supreme Court Justice Caryn Fink offered her condolences to Carlson's family and said that she knew that the sentencing would not be enough.

She acknowledged his guilty plea as a mitigating factor, but insisted that he deserved a lengthy sentence to contemplate his actions.

“Your utter disregard for human life is so abhorrent to our sensibilities that it must be punished,” she said.