Gary woman gets 11 years for role in killings of 2 teens

A Gary woman has been sentenced to 11 years in prison for providing two teenagers with guns and later hiding a gun her boyfriend used to kill them in 2020.

Associated Press

Jun 10 2022 | 2 min read

Dawn Carden, of Gary, Indiana, was sentenced to 11 years in prison for her participation in the murder and coverup of two teenagers by her boyfriend, Alvino Amaya. | Photo: Lake County Indiana Sheriff

CROWN POINT, Ind. (AP) — A Gary woman has been sentenced to 11 years in prison for providing two teenagers with guns and later hiding a gun her boyfriend used to kill them in 2020.

A Lake County judge sentenced Dawn Carden, 43, on Thursday. She had pleaded guilty to charges of assisting a criminal and dangerous control of a firearm stemming from the slayings of 18-year-old Elijah Robinson and Maxwell Kroll, 17.

Carden met the teens because they worked with her son at a fast-food restaurant.

Lake County Deputy Prosecutor Jacquelyn Altpeter said Carden gave her son’s friends drugs and guns, and took advantage of the trust they placed in her.

She said that after Carden’s boyfriend, Alvino S. “Vino” Amaya, 37, went into the teens' home near Griffith in October 2020 and shot the sleeping youths to death execution-style, Carden rented a storage unit in her father’s name and tried to hide the murder weapon and other guns there.

“That really is indicative of her character,” Altpeter said. “She threw her own father under the bus."

Amaya was sentenced in April to 130 years in prison in the killings after a jury convicted him in March of two counts of murder and a firearm enhancement.^[1]