Rodriguez Sentenced to Death for Killing Dru Sjodin

The last chapter has been written in the heart-wrenching story of Dru Sjodin’s horrific death. The killing captured the attention of the nation in November 2003 when Sjodin failed to show up for work and police began looking for her. The following April their investigation led them to a ravine in the mountains of Minnesota, where her body was found, beaten, raped, and stabbed. Her hands were tied behind her back and her throat was cut.

Dru Sjodin was a happy, successful 22-year-old student at the University of North Dakota. She worked at the Victoria’s Secret store in a Grand Forks, ND, shopping mall. On Saturday, November 22, 2003, Sjodin finished her shift at the store around 4:00 p.m. She went to the Marshal Fields store and bought a purse at 5:00 p.m. then walked back into the common area of the mall. Sjodin’s boyfriend, Chris Lang, received a call from her a few minutes later to tell him about her new purse. About four minutes into the conversation, he heard Sjodin murmur, "Okay, okay," and then the line went dead.

Lang said he initially thought the call had just been cut off, but he tried to call her back several times and got no answer. The next day, when Sjodin didn’t show up for work, her roommate called the police. That night her car was found in the parking lot at the mall, and her wallet, driver’s license, student ID, were found inside along with her new purse. But next to the car on the pavement was a knife sheath.

Sjodin’s family and friends waited and prayed for weeks, and the weeks turned into months with no sign of Dru. The following April, her mangled body was discovered in a ravine near Crookston, in northwestern Minnesota. When convicted sex offender Alfonso Rodriguez, Jr., was arrested and charged with murdering Sjodin, his defense lawyers said that he had been anxious about being released from prison, because he had served more than 20 years for assaults on three women between 1975 and 1980. They argued for a sentence of life in prison, saying that Rodriguez had been sexually abused as a child, and had brain damage from exposure to farm chemicals.

Prosecutors were firm in their demands for jurors to sentence Rodriguez to death. North Dakota does not have the death penalty, but it is allowed in federal cases. This case was the first death-penalty case in North Dakota in nearly 100 years.

The jury began its deliberations late Wednesday afternoon, and Friday morning jurors sentenced Rodriguez to death. The killer looked straight ahead as the sentence was pronounced, showing no emotion. His mother and sister cried, as did several of the jurors, and members of Sjodin’s family stared straight ahead somberly. Surely the sentence of death has brought some sense of relief and closure to their three-year ordeal, but nothing will ever lessen the horror of what this monster did to Dru.