COLUMBUS, Neb. (KOLN) - The Columbus man convicted in the murder of one man and shooting of another was sentenced to prison on Wednesday.

A Colfax County judge sentenced 40-year-old Rodolfo Cateura-Nogueras to 50 to 70 years for second-degree murder and 15 to 20 years for second-degree assault. His sentences will run concurrently. He was granted 310 days credit for time served.

Cateura-Nogueras pled guilty to the charges back in November of 2024. He’d previously been charged with first-degree murder and assault, but the charges were lessened and two other counts were dropped.

Authorities were alerted to a crime on April 7, 2024, just before 11:30 p.m. when dispatch in Colfax County got a call from Catuera-Nogueras. He called to let authorities know he’d killed somebody and wanted to talk to an officer about it.

During the call, the man explained that he’d been living with a roommate and his 20-year-old daughter at the time. He alleged that his roommate had been giving his daughter drugs and abusing her. He told the dispatcher, “I’m not calling you to turn him in. I’m calling you to tell you I shot him in the head and I killed him,” according to an arrest affidavit.

The caller mentioned it happened at a storage unit in Schuyler, and officers began searching the property minutes after the call ended. They discovered a spent .22 caliber shell casing along with some blood outside a unit.

They opened the unit up and discovered the body of 45-year-old Ariel Varella Herrera under some black plastic tarps, police wrote. Video surveillance from a nearby business showed a van coming and going from the unit several times on April 7, 2024.

The van eventually returned around 10:20 p.m. that evening when multiple flashes could be seen inside the vehicle. A few minutes later, an apparently bleeding man was seen running from the storage unit and off to another property nearby.

Police spoke with the 38-year-old man who’d been shot some time later, and he identified Cateura-Nogueras as the shooter. The victim told police he worried about Herrera after Cateura-Nogueras told him was “tied up.” The man had been shot twice in the face, but both bullets grazed him with one landing in his arm.

The Nebraska State Patrol pinged the cell phone used to make the call, and authorities in Missouri were able to take Cateura-Nogueras into custody. He was found with the cell phone and a .22 caliber handgun at the time of his arrest, police said.

According to the affidavit, Cateura-Nogueras was renting the storage unit Herrera’s body was found in, and the rental information matched the phone number that contacted dispatch on April 7, 2024.