Billings man accused of killing mother reaches plea deal

A Billings man admitted Thursday that Yellowstone County prosecutors had ample evidence to convict him of murdering his mother in 2024.

Robert Fermin Mascarena pleaded guilty in Yellowstone County District Court to deliberate homicide by way of Alford, meaning that he maintains his innocence while conceding that he’d likely be convicted, had his case gone to trial.

At his change of plea hearing at the Yellowstone County Courthouse before Judge Jessica Fehr, Mascarena said he had no memory of the night he fatally stabbed Patricia Mascarena in front of a 12-year-old girl. Mascarena, 40, told Fehr he had not personally looked at any interview transcripts, police footage or photographs detailing the homicide.

“I’d rather not remember,” Mascarena said.

On the night of June 28, 2024, according to court documents, law enforcement received a call from a girl. She told police that her uncle, Mascarena, was stabbing her grandmother. All three were staying at a trailer on Bench Boulevard, and the girl had run to a residence next door when the violence erupted.

Deputies with the Yellowstone County Sheriff's Office and Billings police officers responded. Mascarena remained inside the trailer, armed with a handgun and a knife, charging documents said.

One deputy heard Patricia Mascarena call for help and he tried to enter the home. While waiting for officers to bring a ram for the locked front door, the deputy, Kevin Stahlberg, allegedly heard Mascarena say he had a gun and was “going to kill her.”

Stahlberg looked through a window and saw Mascarena raise his arm. The deputy fired six rounds through the front door, one of which grazed Mascarena’s abdomen.

Police rammed through the front door of the trailer, finding Patricia Mascarena on the living room floor. Mascarena briefly barricaded himself inside a bedroom. When he jumped out of a window, officers arrested him.

Leading up to Mascarena changing his plea in court Thursday, Senior Deputy Yellowstone County Attorney Sabrina Currie recounted the evidence gathered in the subsequent investigation that would have been shared in court, had the case against Mascarena gone to trial.

“As officers took photos of the defendant, he flipped the camera off with the middle fingers of his blood-soaked hands," Currie said.

Currie went into grizzly detail on the trauma Macarena inflicted on his mother. The senior prosecutor paused to compose herself as she noted the struggle to save Patrica’s life.

A BPD officer and an ambulance crew with American Medical Response packed her wounds with gauze and applied CPR, but declared Patrica Mascarena dead at the scene. She was 55 years old.

Detectives who processed the scene found evidence in the trailer of a violent attack, with several items broken, knocked over and coated with blood, Currie said.

“Some of the physical evidence recovered and tagged into evidence included the fired cartridge casings, a large, blood-covered kitchen knife that was sitting on a box next to (Patricia Mascarena’s) body and a second, medium-sized, blood-covered knife that was located in the defendant’s bedroom.”

On June 29, 2024, Mascarena entered Yellowstone County Detention Facility. Days later, he pleaded not guilty to deliberate homicide. He remained in custody at the jail through his change of plea hearing, with his bond set at $500,000.

With his change of plea, Mascarena faces up to life in prison. At the close of Thursday’s hearing, Judge Fehr set a tentative sentencing date for August.

However, defense attorneys representing Mascarena told Fehr they intended to request he be evaluated for a possible commitment to the Department of Health and Human Services. Currie, recommending an 85-year prison sentence, said she will object to the request.

While Mascarena has undergone evaluations that confirmed he does have significant mental health issues, Fehr said none of those were conducted specifically to determine if a sentence to the Montana State Hospital would be appropriate for him. Fehr said she will await the defense’s motion to have Mascarena undergo such an evaluation, but did estimate that the wait at MSH for mental examinations is currently around nine months to a year.

Last year, a joint effort on the part of DPHHS and the Montana Board of Investments resulted in a behavioral health facility planned for construction just outside of Laurel. Amid the protests of some locals, state health officials have touted the 32-bed mental healthcare center as a key solution to cutting down on the massive backlog of people in the Montana court system requiring psychological evaluations and treatment.

Domestic and family violence have consistently accounted for more than half of the violent crime that BPD responds to in Billings, according to data from the department. Earlier this week, a man pleaded not guilty to accusations of killing a Billings woman while the two were going through a divorce. Since 2021, according to past reporting from the Billings Gazette, there have been at least nine deaths in Billings related to domestic violence: seven women and two young boys.