The family and friends of student Fernando Palominio Zambori, 21, are still trying to process what happened to the youngest of three brothers. At around 4 am on Saturday, the 13th, he was leaving the Vitrinni Lounge Beer, in Itaim Bibi, in the south of São Paulo, when an argument in traffic resulted in his death by being run over. Images captured by the establishment’s security camera show the moment a Land Rover Velar knocks him down, passes over his body and flees without providing help.
“It was a very cold act, you can’t even think it could have been an accident”, says Andressa Zambori, Felipe’s older sister, 28 years old. Mother of a ten-month-old baby, she tells the Estadão who learned of the death of her youngest by her husband the next morning. “He was a sweetheart. He had nothing different to justify such a crime,” she says.
According to Andressa, her brother was a captive customer of Vitrinni Lounge Beer, where he went with the same friends he’s had for over 12 years. During the week, he worked in an accounting firm and helped another friend sell sneakers and a T-shirt. The routine of going home from work was only interrupted on weekdays when the boy went to a bar or someone’s house to watch São Paulo games, the club he supported.
On the Saturday he was killed, Fernando went to Vitrinni with two of these childhood friends. The sister says that he was the first to pay the order and got into the car with the driver, who paid right away. While the third member of the group was still checking out, they were trying to get out of the car when they started to hear screams and insults from someone driving behind.
“They didn’t know each other”, observes Andressa, stating that there was no relationship between Fernando and the man who ran him over. “By the footage, you can see that when it was time to leave there was a lot of traffic and a lot of cars on the street. The guy in the back started cursing to get ‘that f****’ out of the way. But it was no use getting angry and stressed because he had nowhere else to go. When my brother left to ask for calm, he did that.”
When the last friend of the group managed to get out of the bar, Fernando was already on the floor. According to his sister, the Land Rover ran over him three times. The Public Security Secretariat (SSP) reported that military police officers were called to attend to the incident and, at the indicated location, they found the victim being attended by civil firefighters. The death was confirmed by the doctor of the Mobile Emergency Care Service (Samu).
The 27th Police District identified the driver as 28-year-old Gustavo dos Santos Soares. According to friends of Fernando, the car he was driving had no license plate. On social media, family members of the victim shared a photo of the suspect released by the police and called for justice for the 20-year-old boy.
grief and hate
Fernando lived with his father, the salesman Maurício, his mother, the pharmacist Débora, and his sister Stefani, 22 years old. Andressa, the oldest of the three, moved out of the house in Pirituba during the pandemic and went to live with her husband and Atibaia. “He was the first person I called when I found out I was pregnant. We had plans that he would teach my son so many things…”, she comments over the phone, unable to hold back her tears.
Andressa says that Dona Débora used to sleep in the living room at home whenever one of her children goes out, no matter how much she knows where they are going. When she heard the phone ring in the early hours of Saturday, her mother thought it was her son telling her she had forgotten her keys. On the other hand, Maurício’s father, upon discovering Fernando’s death, tried to protect his daughters from the news.
“The family is going to the house all the time, but they lost a child, right? They don’t feel like eating. My mother is very angry, in a way I’ve never seen her before. And my father is stagnant, he can’t even talk”, says Andressa. She says she only decided to speak to the press in hopes of finding the suspect in her brother’s murder.
Fernando would have turned 22 on December 27th. In the last few weeks, he had been making plans to resume his studies and take a course in higher education. I was still deciding whether to be law or medicine. Proudly, the sister says that the wake brought together “all types of people, of all religions”. “I don’t know how he did it, but he managed to get a lot of different groups of friends together.”
The last time Andressa spoke to her brother was on the afternoon of Friday the 12th, just hours before he left for the party. “We talk about normal brotherly things. We used to video chat for him to see my son. I asked how my parents were and that was it. I didn’t imagine…”
In a note, the SSP informed that the case continues to be investigated by the 27th DP, that the suspect had the temporary arrest decreed by the Justice and the “proceedings are still in progress aiming at his location and the clarification of the fact”.
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