Killer Who Hid Victim's Body in Air Duct Gets Maximum Sentence Joseph Pabon's father, Nat, after his son's sentencing. A judge on Tuesday sentenced a man to 25 years to life in prison for the murder of a woman who was bound, gagged and stuffed into the air duct of the Lower Manhattan building where she cleaned offices. The disappearance of the woman, Eridania Rodriguez, in July 2009 captured imaginations and headlines for three days as the police searched for clues, even combing through a Pennsylvania landfill where the building's trash was dumped. She had seemed to vanish into thin air. One minute, Ms. Rodriguez, a 46-year-old grandmother, was making her usual evening rounds cleaning offices at 2 Rector Street. The next, her co-workers had found an abandoned mop and a stray hair clip where she had been working. Soon after her body was found, the police arrested Joseph Pabon, an elevator operator at the building where Ms. Rodriguez worked. He was convicted in April of murder and kidnapping. Prosecutors said Mr. Pabon, now 28, had followed Ms. Rodriguez to the eighth floor of the building, where he bound and suffocated her with industrial tape. His DNA was found under her fingernails, indicating there was a struggle. He used a freight elevator to move her body to the 12th floor, which was undergoing renovation, and hid her body in an air duct. "These are the acts of a despicable, soulless human being," said Christine Keenan, an assistant district attorney, in asking Justice Maxwell Wiley of State Supreme Court in Manhattan to impose the maximum sentence, which he did. Ms. Keenan said the killing was not without warning signals in Mr. Pabon's life, saying that he has "anger issues" and a history of violence with his first wife and that he had been recorded on a Rikers Island telephone after his arrest making repeated violent threats to his current wife. One of Ms. Rodriguez's children, Denise Figueroa, 29, wept repeatedly as she told the judge that her life and those of her two siblings had been destroyed by Mr. Pabon. All three now suffer from depression, she said, and have had setbacks as a result. Ms. Figueroa said she was haunted by thoughts of her mother's "horrible, disgusting death." She said she was afraid to be among strangers, had lost most of her hair to stress, and had difficulty giving her best to her own children. "My mother was a person full of positive thoughts," Ms. Figueroa said. I miss seeing her, spending time with her. I miss her voice, her laughs. Ms. Rodriguez, who lived in Washington Heights, immigrated to New York with her family from the Dominican Republic in the early 1980s. In interviews after her death, friends and relatives said she had grown fearful working after business hours in the 26-story building because the offices were so desolate. Mr. Pabon, wearing an untucked striped black dress shirt and glasses, stared straight ahead throughout the proceeding. Asked whether he would like to say anything to the judge before being sentenced, he said loudly, "No." Mario F. Gallucci, one of Mr. Pabon's lawyers, pointed out that Mr. Pabon's father, his sister and his current wife were in the courtroom and had been for much or all of the trial. Mr. Pabon and his first wife had a daughter in 2003, Mr. Gallucci said. Mr. Gallucci said that Mr. Pabon's mother died when he was young and that his father raised five children on Staten Island as best he could. The lawyer expressed sympathy for Ms. Rodriguez and her family, but asked the judge to consider that Mr. Pabon had "lived a pretty productive life" before the murder. In sentencing Mr. Pabon to the maximum term, Justice Wiley noted that "mountains and mountains of evidence" proved that he had killed Ms. Rodriguez with "unimaginable cruelty." "But we will never know why he did it," Justice Wiley said.