OSCEOLA COUNTY, Fla. — One of the defendants in a bizarre murder-for-hire case in Osceola County now says one of the people charged with being an accomplice is innocent.

In a letter written to the judge in the case, Ishnar Lopez-Ramos claims that Alexis Ramos-Rivera is innocent.

Kissimmee mother Janice Zengotita Torres was kidnapped, beaten, and suffocated in January 2018. The Osceola County Sheriff’s Office has indicated that Zengotita Torres was killed in a murder-for-hire plot gone wrong when the kidnappers grabbed the incorrect person.

The three people charged with the crime are Lopez-Ramos, Glorianmarie Quiñones-Montes, and her boyfriend, Ramos-Rivera.

In a letter to the judge, Lopez-Ramos said, “I ask you with all my heart to release Alexis Ramos-Rivera. I assure you that he is not guilty of everything. Why I wait too long for this? Because my conscience is killing me, and he is innocent … He was never with us. He just put himself on the crime scene because of my threats, and he already knew that [Glorianmarie] was pregnant.”

On Friday, Zengotita Torres’s family spoke publicly on the case for the first time. Carmen Hernandez Zengotita, her niece, said, “We will not stop working along with Sheriff [Marco] Lopez, the whole entire Osceola County Sheriff’s Department, and State Attorney [Monica] Worrell in order to bring justice for my aunt and to bring this to light.”

The family has met with the new state attorney to talk about the case after Aramis Ayala filed notice not to seek the death penalty in the case on her last day on the job. There is a Nelson hearing for Lopez-Ramos on Thursday at the Osceola County Courthouse to determine whether a court-appointed attorney should be removed from the case.