Bucks killer sentenced to life in prison for murdering ex-girlfriend outside her home

Jeanie Millward wanted her daughter’s killer to know the searing pain he caused her family.

He stole Jaden Battista’s future, she said, before it could truly begin. He robbed her friends and family of a supportive, kind soul whose pets are still waiting for her to come home every night. And he left an entire community with grief that Millward described as overwhelming and unrelenting, “a constant heartache.”

“Jaden mattered, her life mattered, and nothing can bring her back,” a tearful Millward told Trevor Weigel inside a Doylestown courtroom on Tuesday. “I will grieve for my daughter for the rest of my life.”

Weigel, 25, averted his eyes as she spoke, keeping them lowered on the handcuffs binding him.

The Churchville native was sentenced to life in prison Tuesday for killing Battista, 19, on the front lawn of her Lower Makefield home as horrified police officers looked on. In an attack that prosecutors condemned for its brutality, Weigel, furious at their recent breakup, dragged his former girlfriend out of her home and stabbed her 14 times, specifically targeting vital parts of her body.

A jury convicted him of first-degree murder and related crimes after a weeklong trial in January.

Bucks County Court Judge Charissa Liller sentenced Weigel on Tuesday to an additional five to 20 years in state prison for burglary and attempted kidnapping in the February 2024 incident.

Weigel’s attorney, Brian McBeth, emphasized that his client had suffered through a traumatic childhood punctuated by abuse from his alcoholic father.

At trial, McBeth said that the attack on Battista was sudden and unprompted, that his client “snapped” and did something inexcusable in the heat of the moment.

He has accepted full responsibility for his actions, the lawyer said, and is remorseful for the damage he caused to Battista’s family, as well as his own.

“I know Trevor is more than the man we saw that day, more than his actions that day,” McBeth said. “And he is capable of redemption.”

In his own apology to Battista’s family in the crowded courtroom, Weigel said not a day goes by where he does not wish he could trade places with her.

“I want it known that I’m so, extremely sorry for what I’ve done and how it affected everyone’s lives,” he said.

Liller, the judge, was not swayed, and admonished Weigel for the apparent lack of remorse he showed during his trial. Weigel said the two had gotten engaged days before the killing, and he testified that Battista goaded him into stabbing her with salacious details about her infidelity.

Assistant District Attorney A.J. Garabedian called that a “farcical story” and said the jury rightfully saw through Weigel’s lies.

Liller agreed, noting that Weigel had left Battista a series of increasingly angry voicemails and text messages as he drove to her home.

“The brutal way you killed her proved to me this was planned,” the judge said. “You couldn’t stand it. You were fuming and you were going to handle it the way you learned from your dad, the angry way, the bullying way.”