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A criminal court in Costa Rica found four out of seven defendants guilty of murder and other crimes on Tuesday, sentencing all four to the maximum sentence permitted by law and concluding the second trial in the case of murdered environmentalist, Jairo Mora Sandoval, who was killed in May 2013 while protecting sea turtle nesting areas from poachers in Moin, Limon on the country’s Caribbean coast.

Besides being found guilty of murder, the four convicted defendants – Ernesto Enrique Centeno Rivas, Héctor Martín Cash López, José Brayan Quesada Cubillo and Donald Alberto Salmon Meléndez – were also found guilty of charges including false imprisonment, kidnapping, aggravated robbery, and rape.

The four men will serve the maximum combined sentence permissible under Costa Rican law of 50 years in prison (35 years each for murder and another 15 years each for their other crimes).

The three other defendants were acquitted.

Mora, 26 at the time, was killed on May 31^st, 2013 after being intercepted on Moin beach by a group of hooded men.

Mora was accompanied by four women — three Americans and a Spaniard — who were walking the beach with him to keep poachers from robbing leatherback turtle eggs.

The women were separated from Mora and locked in an abandoned building, while the environmentalist was taken away to his death.

His body was found beaten, nude, with his hands tied behind his back and blunt force trauma to his head. Autopsy results revealed that he had died from asphyxiation after being struck in the head, likely due to swallowing and inhaling copious amounts of sand while lying face-down and unconscious on the beach.

Mora’s companions were raped and robbed.

With the convictions and sentences, Tuesday marked the conclusion of the second trial in the case of Mora’s murder.

The first trial ended in the acquittal of all seven of the defendants – largely blamed on a bungled investigation and mishandled evidence – but the country’s high appeals court accepted an appeal by prosecutors, overturned the acquittal and ordered a new trial, which began on January 25^th.