The process for the crime of Fernando Báez Sosa comes to an end. This Wednesday the charges begin, the verdict is near and the fate of Zárate’s group of friends will be known who will go down in Argentine criminal history as “the eight rugby players”.
They are accused of beating and kicking that 18-year-old boy from Recoleta who had left for the first time alone on holiday at Villa Gesell and that on January 18, 2020 they were crossed in and out of Le Brique bowling alley.
It could be said that there is no other case like this they gathered more evidence in video – from security cameras to mobile phones – messages, WhatsApp audio, traces on the victim’s body or eyewitnesses. Not that I have accumulated many opinions in and out of that court.
But, again, “the body spoke” – as they say in scientific jargon -, technology spoke, experts, family members, acquaintances and even pathological women spoke who took rugby players out of the club when the fury, which was untied by a few thrusts, spawned a ferocious scene, right on the way out.
In the test, five of the eight rugby players who had forged with the same strength a three-year silence pact: Ciro, Lucas and Luciano Pertossi, Máximo Thomsen and Blas Cinalli. Ayrton Viollaz, Matías Benicelli and Enzo Comelli kept silent.
Juan Pedro Guarino, arrested for the crime but fired, also gave his vision. And although he has been summoned, Alejo Milanesi, the other young man in the group declared innocent, has not spoken.
The stage that follows in the trial is the presentation of the charges by the prosecution, the lawyer Fernando Burlando, on behalf of the family, on Wednesday, and that of the sole defender, Hugo Tomei, who represents the eight rugby players and will hear on Thursday .
Before these fundamental topics, before any lawyer tests his investigation (and his oratory) before the judges, the victim’s family, the defendants and the country (because it can be seen on YouTube and the media will broadcast it live) , before answers are offered or what the interlocutor raises is denied, before knowing if the sentence is “life imprisonment for all” or if there was a murder in a fight, the process has already defined objective facts. They do not change, beyond what the Oral Criminal Court (TOC) n. 1 of Dolores.
The images from the cameras
It was not one, but two fists hitting the face by Fernando Báez Sosa to bring him down when he was caught in front of the bowling alley. The blows were “almost simultaneous”: one revelation – among many – resulting from the expert report. For this reason the sequence is no longer the same: now it is necessary to identify not one, but two rugby players who attack him from behind. The attack mechanics have been redefined.
After 13 days of debate in which prosecutors and defense used and compared their best material to support their hypotheses, the narrative of the crime has gained substance. With your imperfect statements, the defendants themselves gave their contribution.
For example, when Blas Cinalli was asked by prosecutor Juan Manuel Dávila to identify himself in a video and it was revealed. It’s that what he had said a few minutes before, what he had said he remembered, kicking a boy who was holding his foot to make him let go and then walking away from the scene, It was not the same as what was shown on the screen.
In fact, the boy on the ground (Tomás D’Alessandro, Fernando’s friend) lets go of his leg, but Cinalli does not go away. On the contrary: it is seen when he faces the point where Báez Sosa is beaten.
The prosecutor asked him: “Didn’t you see in front of you a shirtless, kneeling, receiving blows?” Cinalli said no. Not even he could explain Why did her blood end up on Fernando’s little finger?.
The trace of blood under the nail of the little finger of the victim’s left hand was detected by the geneticist César Guida, of the Public Prosecutor’s Office (MPF). Supported by the report attached to the file, he said that Fernando’s DNA was also found in Máximo Thomsen’s two sneakers, not only on the right, with which he kicked him in the head.
Ferdinand’s blood it spread through the air and indicted four of his assailants. In addition to the sneakers, traces were found in a white floral shirt, jeans and a shoe by Matías Benicelli, in the jeans of Ciro Pertossi and in the gabardine trousers of Luciano Pertossi, his younger brother, complicated by the oral debate.
It was at the ninth hearing, when four Federal Police experts testified jointly, and recounted the work done with the different footage (from public cameras, private surveillance and mobile devices) and the sequences they made to make the facial recognition of each member of Zárate’s group of friends.
At the conclusion of the presentation of their report, for which they were accompanied by Power Point films, the prosecution lawyers asked to analyze right there what a camera had filmed from the opposite sidewalk, from the door of Le Brique, the nightclub.
“Can you enlarge the image?” asked a lawyer for the lawsuit. Hugo Tomei, the defender of the eight defendants, objected, but Judge María Claudia Castro, who presides over the Court, did not make room. “Tell me what you see. Take your time,” the lawyer waited.
Up to the figure of a young man dressed in a black T-shirt, who would later be identified as Luciano Pertossi by federal experts, is seen emerging from behind the car. Like Cinalli, he heads towards the place where Fernando is beaten. Until that moment, there was no image that placed Luciano there; the find also explains how Báez Sosa’s blood would have ended up on his pants.
It’s those pictures there are eleven rugby players. I am in recognition Alejo Milanesi, Juan Pedro Guarino and Tomás Colazo. But the Judge found no elements against him: the first two were archived and the last one was not even charged.
Hits and punches
Graciela and Silvino, Fernando’s parents, only had to leave the room in certain sections of the evidentiary stage. Reluctantly, but their lawyers ended up convincing them: really strong images would be displayed from the autopsy to the body of who Fernando Báez Sosa was.
The coroner who carried out the autopsy operation, Diego Duarte, said he had never seen anything like it, he spoke of “injuries incompatible with life” and “multicausal traumas: there are injuries to various organs, it is a sum of everything, but moreover he has isolated lesions, both to the liver and to the lung, the most important thing is the nervous system“.
Some photos have enlarged the details of the young face of Báez Sosa, and for the first time Thomsen’s shoe print was visible in his left jaw. Not only that: it was explained how the zig-zag sole design was marked as a stamp.
It happens that the part of the sole that has been marked is not the one on the front. In other words, in addition to “punching” as described by those who saw them kick Thomsen, there was a stomp. From what was described, the former CASI player raised his right leg (Fernando was already unconscious) and he trampled us with his heel.
THE “almost simultaneous” strikes from behind They have been described by the expert Javier Pablo Laborde, also from the MPF, who has been commissioned to provide a detailed breakdown of the analysis he has made on the images. He thus discovered that from the video that Lucas Pertossi took with his cell phone, at the precise moment Fernando was shot down, he received two pineapples. He identified them as Ciro Pertossi and Enzo Comelli.
Five of the defendants gave theirs exculpatory versions in court. First Luciano Pertossi (“I’m not here”, denies the video), then Máximo Thomsen, after declaring that his mother, Rosalía Zárate, is being treated for cancer. She broke down and actually said it it was he who was given a pineappleand defended himself by kicking.
The other three were Ciro Pertossi (“I stopped football when I saw the boy was unconscious”), Lucas Pertossi (“I’ve never participated in a murder plan, I just went on vacation”) and Cinalli, who ended up being located in the scene. For all of them, it was “a fight”, not “an ambush”as claimed by the prosecution and described by friends of Fernando.
The defendant wasn’t too busy countering what the videos showed, the place that every rugby player occupied that morning on the pavement in front of Le Brique. But each was asked to locate themselves in a sketch that made them draw.
Taking a cue from the annulment applications he filed and denied early in the trial, what Tomei was apparently doing was filling out what he believed could ease the situation of his defendantspointing to contradictions, seeking responsibility among those who performed CPR on Fernando or, on the last day, with experts who analyzed the autopsy report and concluded that “it does not appear to have been done by a doctor”.
It has been learned, in these thirteen days of debate, that the eight rugby players are housed in what would be the punishment and isolation pavilion of the Dolores prison, what they call “mailboxes” due to the characteristics of their doors, compact, metal, with a single window in the center. But what for them, housed in pairs, works as a watchman.
They were also noticeable courageous attitudes, like that of Virginia Pérez Antonelli, the 20-year-old girl who didn’t hesitate for a moment when she saw that the policeman who was resuscitating that boy injured on the street was applying more force than necessary in each compression. She took charge of the maneuvers, directed them and ended up holding Fernando’s head so that someone else could continue them. “When they took him away, I looked at my hands and they were bloody”he recalled with anguish.
Even the admirable strength of that pair of Paraguayan immigrants with affable tones and gazes, who walk hand in hand through the streets of this warm little town that is Dolores, moving slowly, and thanking them they always hug each other in the arms of strangers who stop at give him a caress, a mime.
Collaborator: Emilia Vexler
Source: Clarin
