Albuquerque, NM (KKOB) – The state Supreme Court Tuesday reinstated Isaias Lobato-Rodriguez’s second-degree murder conviction for the death of a Florida woman who was driving him to Mexico. In 2017, her body was found by law enforcement inside a van, crashed into a fence along a highway in southwestern New Mexico. Court documents reveal, the engine was still running, the victim in the driver’s seat with a belt wrapped around her neck. The defendant approached officers at the scene and admitted that he strangled the victim, saying she had planned to kill him and his daughter. Lobato-Rodriguez was an agricultural worker in Florida who had received a cash settlement for a job-related injury. The victim was a former immigration law paralegal who agreed to drive Lobato-Rodriguez to live with his daughter in a border community in Mexico.