The second session of the trial for the crime of Samuel Luiz confirmed this Thursday the strategies that the defenses already hinted at in their initial writings. A crossfire, in a kind of ‘every man for himself’, of the five accused to shake off their responsibility in the murder by pointing out their colleagues on the bench. Alejandro Míguez and Catherine Silva, the first to testify—and the only ones of the five who are on provisional release—sThey pointed the finger directly at Diego Montaña and Alejandro Freire, alias ‘Llumba’, as perpetrators of the lynching: “I clearly see how they attack him,” They agreed.
Alejandro Míguez was the first to occupy the interrogation chair. He defended himself by claiming that he had only intervened in the attack to separate them. But not only that. He pointed to Diego, his friend: “I see how he is throwing a series of punches at a person I don’t know”. Also to Llumba, who was “holding by the neck” Samuel Luiz, whom none of them knew. And two other young people involved in the crime, who were already tried and convicted in a separate trial because they were minors at the time: Marco and David, known by the nickname ‘Pompo’. «I see quite a few people there, but that directly attack [a la víctima] I see those four people that I mentioned.”Alejandro Míguez certified when asked about the accusations.
Catherine Silva, the second of the accused to testify, also incriminated Llumba and, above all, Diego Montaña, who was also her boyfriend at the time of the events: “Diego lunged at this boy and punched him.” She also saw how Llumba “grabs him [a Samuel] by the neck.” But Chatherine, when asked by both the prosecutor, Olga Serrano, and her lawyer, said more. She confirmed that her boyfriend hurled homophobic insults at Samuel before attacking him. “Diego said ‘stop recording or I’ll kill you, faggot'”although he clarified that he did not consider him a person who rejected gays.
Delving into a nuclear issue when it comes to escaping, or not, the aggravating circumstance of discrimination, Katy explained that Diego used to say the word “faggot”, but he never noticed homophobic attitudes in him. Asked if she perceived the victim’s sexual condition when they saw Samuel with a friend on the street, she said no. That they would have even passed as a couple.
in the wrong place
In addition to pointing in the same direction when incriminating two of their friends, the accused who testified this Thursday have agreed in their attempt to distance himself from the attacking group, in the eyes of the popular juries. From the beginning of the two statements, the defenses insisted on making it clear that their clients were in an inopportune place that night, that it did not belong to them. For Alejandro Míguez, his only friend among the four with whom he shares the bench was Diego, the person to whom all the spotlights point. Also for Katy, who revealed that it was the “first night” she went out with her partner’s gang. Regarding the development of the beating, the six fatal minutes in which a mob put an end to Samuel’s life, these two defendants also gave parallel versions. None of them, heeding his words, intervened in the beating. They only got close to the core, they say, to try to separate them.
“My intention was to separate them”
“I consider myself innocent,” Míguez began, just before explaining how, according to him, the events occurred: “I see Diego punching a person I didn’t know, he was falling and getting up. There was a crowd surrounding him. Llumba was holding him by the neck. I listen to Katy telling me not to do anything because it’s all Diego’s fault (…) I don’t know why the aggression starts. I put my arms in and tried to access Diego, but I was pushed backwards by the tumult. My intention was to separate them,” said Alejandro Míguez.
Inert before a person who was being lynched in the middle of the street, Míguez remembers seeing how two young Senegalese men got into the crowd to get Samuel out of there and how they picked him up and carried him a few meters away. “At that moment I disengage, I disengage, because I see that it is impossible to separate them,” he says. From a distance, he recalls, “I saw that Samuel collapsed.” “At that moment,” he maintained, “I was alone.”
The next screen in his story places him in the city hospital, accompanying a friend’s girlfriend with an alcohol coma. There, he said, he saw an ambulance arrive and a paramedic told him that the injured person was a boy who had been beaten on the seafront. “It makes me think that it could have been the person who was with Diego and Kaio on the walk,” he said.
Questioned by the prosecutor, Míguez denied recognizing himself in the majority of images that the investigation recovered from that night. Most blurry, although others relatively sharp. But the accused was not able to identify himself in almost any of them. He also did not identify the rest of those investigated: «The images seem quite diffuse to me, I don’t recognize anyone». In his case, the accusations ask for 22 years in prison for the crime.
In her turn to speak, Katy took the opportunity to draw before the citizen court the image of a girl who had nothing to do with the violent gang that sentenced the nurse. “They are right, it was a hunt, an animal raid,” the accused acknowledged. adopting the adjectives that the prosecutor used in the first session of the trial.
However, and despite the accusation that hangs over her, Catherine maintained at all times that she witnessed the events almost from the sidelines. His thesis is parallel to that of Míguez: «I told him to stop, that we were leaving there now, but Diego lunged at him with his fists. There was a girl next to them and at that moment Llumba appears and throws him to the ground. Samuel was on the ground with two people on top of him and I tried to get Diego out of there. “I separated Lina, because later I tried to separate Diego.” With this story, the accused turns around the testimony of the person who accompanied Samuel (and who will testify this Friday), who insisted during the investigation phase that Katy threw her to the ground so that she could not help her friend.
Close gay friends
The statement from Katy, for whom the accusations demand 25 years in prison, the same sentence as for her ex-boyfriend, continued with nuclear details. «There was a group and Pompo (minor) “He had an object of this size with which he did this to him (examples a blow to the head)” he revealed. By ‘object’ he refers to a Japanese weapon called ‘kubotán’ that another of the witnesses also named during the investigation phase.
And Katy, to try to overcome the aggravating circumstance of sexual discrimination that the Prosecutor’s Office attributes to her, as well as to her ex-boyfriend, highlighted when asked by her lawyer that one of her close friends is gay and another is transsexual. They will appear in court as witnesses.
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