KENOSHA, Wis. (Court TV) — A man sitting in jail on charges he killed his estranged wife is facing new charges after his cellmate led deputies to a shiv inside their cell.
Marckus Plaza (Kenosha County Sheriff’s Office)
Marckus Plaza, 34, was initially arrested in April on charges of first-degree intentional homicide, causing mental harm to a child and resisting an officer after the death of his estranged wife, identified in court documents as “MMP.”
Officers with the Kenosha Police Department were called for a welfare check on April 1, 2026. When they arrived and knocked on the door, Plaza answered and identified himself as “Allen” before immediately shutting the door in the officers’ faces. One officer walked around the back of the house and looked in through the basement window, where he allegedly saw Plaza dragging a body.
When the police forced their way inside the home, they found evidence of a struggle, including blood and a cellphone that had been bent in half. The victim’s body was found in the home’s basement with a knife in her left eye. Plaza and his estranged wife shared two small children, who were found with their mother’s body.
One of the children, who was 4 years old at the time, told investigators, “Momma got dead,” and “Daddy use a knife, my dad do it. He put knife in [mommy’s] forehead.” The child further said, “Daddy hit mommy,” and described the defendant as “naughty.”
Plaza fled from the home when police entered the property; he was arrested after a search that lasted more than 24 hours, WITI reported at the time.
The defendant has been in the Kenosha County Jail on a $2 million bond since his arrest.
On Thursday, Kenosha County prosecutors filed an additional charge of possession of an illegal article by an inmate after deputies said they found “an improvised knife constructed out of a hard plastic ballpoint pen.”
Investigators were searching Plaza’s cell after his cellmate, identified in court documents as “CAR,” asked to speak with investigators regarding a homicide. When investigators took CAR to an interview room, he brought a folder with “numerous pieces of paper” inside. CAR told the officers “he had obtained a fully written confession from his cellmate,” the court documents said, and was willing to share it with the police in exchange for a signed deal that would allow CAR to be released on electronic monitoring. Detectives and the district attorney’s office declined the deal but executed a search warrant on the cell, which revealed the shiv.
Plaza is scheduled to appear in court on the new charge on Thursday afternoon. He is due to return to court in the homicide case in November for a status conference; no trial date has been set.
