Opening statements and witness testimony were heard in a Manhattan court on Tuesday in the murder-for-hire trial following the 2024 killing of New York art dealer Brent Sikkeman.
Sikkema was found brutally murdered in January 2024 in his Rio de Janeiro apartment. Alejandro Triana Prevez, a 30-year-old Cuban national, was arrested just days later, and claimed that the dealer’s ex-husband, Daniel Carrera Sikkema, had offered him $200,000 to carry out the crime. Carrera Sikkema was arrested two months later in New York; shortly later, the Brazilian legal team representing Prevez resigned. In February 2025, Carrera Sikkema was charged with hiring Prevez.
“Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicholas Pavlis said in an opening statement that the government will use witness testimony, digital and financial records, and location data to show that Daniel Sikkema was in frequent contact with the alleged hitman before and after the killing,” reports the AP, adding that Carrera Sikkema bragged about the payout he would receive after his estranged husband’s death and lied in a taped interview with the FBI.
The killer “immediately made a phone call,” Pavlis said, per the New York Post. “Who did he call? He called that man, Daniel Sikkema, that man who hired and paid him to kill Brent.” The paper reports that Pavlis told the jury that Carrera Sikkema sent the killer thousands of dollars through various intermediaries, including “a housekeeper, her daughter, a handyman, and even the suspect’s romantic partner.”
A witness, retired pharmacist Angela Liriano, took the witness stand and said that in a phone call, Carrera Skikkema had said of Brent, on learning that he was traveling to Brazil, “Oh, well I truly hope that he’s dead, that he dies.” She testified that she had become very close to the two men and that Carrera Sikkema had complained that he might get only $6 million in the pending divorce.
“Daniel did not hire Alejandro to kill Brent,” his lawyer, Florian Miedel, told jurors, per the Post, which reports that Carrera Sikkema was unemotional on the witness stand, even when shown photos of his ex-husband’s bloody corpse.
The defense warned the jury not to put too much stock in “assumptions, suggestions, inferences” and “circumstantial evidence,” downplaying some of Carrera Sikkema’s statements as extreme things uttered amid a combative divorce.
