Justice has refused the release of Junior Benítez who will face trial in prison for violence against his ex-partner

Junior Benitez suffered a major setback in terms of the legal situation, because They rejected a proposal to obtain release. The footballer trained at Lanús and with a past in Boca Juniors, among other teams, is detained for more than a month after not respecting the house arrest to which he was subjected because he was accused of gender violence against his ex-partner Anabelia Ayala, who took her own life on New Year’s Day.

So, Benítez will be tried for which he is charged with the crimes of “coercion aggravated by the use of a weapon, damage, threats, disobedience and possession of a weapon without due legal authorization”, housed in the guardian of Lomas de Zamora. The trial will begin on March 19th.

The sentence denying Benítez freedom was signed by the Second Section of the Criminal Appeals and Guarantee Chamber of Lomas de Zamora, composed of judges Pablo Alberto Little and Alejandro Adrián Rojas.

Both unanimously considered the approach of the footballer’s defense, carried out by the lawyer María Inés Salomone, to be insufficient and approved the action of the Correctional Court 8 of Lomé, presided over by Manuel Barreiro.

“The defense thesis is limited to stating that he never had the intention of leaving his home and that there are still elements to establish whether he transgressed the limits that had been imposed on him”, the magistrates specified.

In any case, they then added: “However, what Dr. Salomone claimed in her writing did not expressly refute the reasons for which the judge of first instance reached the conviction regarding Benítez’s procedural offenses in having he did not respect the commitment he made when he was granted house arrest as a way to mitigate the coercive effects of preventive detention.”

Benitez He has been detained since January 12after violating the conditions of house arrest that had been granted to him in this case, when he passed in front of his ex-partner’s house, days before committing suicide.

Indeed, He continues to be investigated in a parallel case for “investigations into the causes of death” as reported by Justice Esteban Echeverría, after Ayala’s father reported that Benítez had induced his daughter to commit suicide and that he had also had a video call with her when the woman had hanged herself in the early hours of January 1st.

The four acts of violence of which Junior Benítez is accused

As for the four acts of violence of which Benítez is accused and for which he will be tried within a month, they occurred between January 2021 and May 2023.

According to the prosecution, the first occurred on January 16, 2021in the house located at 600 Rodríguez Peña, in the Almirante Brown neighborhood, where Benítez destroyed the files of a notebook belonging to the family of his ex-partner.

The next day, Benítez allegedly barged in with a firearm in the same house and, in a context of gender violence, threatened Juan Carlos Ayala, father of his partner, so that he would not intervene in the problems that existed between him and his daughter, after which he set fire to various elements of Anabelia on the door home.

Another of the events he is accused of occurred on February 28, 2022, when, according to the Prosecutor’s Office, the footballer disobeyed the ban on approaching within 300 meters of his father-in-law and his family group and threatened him: “You have reported me, you have put me in trouble, I am killing myself, you will kill me .” “. In the same incident he also threatened to kill another family member.

WhileMarch 18, 2022and always at the same address, Benítez allegedly once again disobeyed the ban on approaching the house of his partner, who threatened to open the door with a knife, even though when the woman refused, she damaged the four tires of the Peugeot car 406 of his father. .

Finally, the Public Prosecutor accuses Benítez of having had a Bersa 9mm caliber pistol in his home, at Esteban Echeverría’s party, whose possession permit had expired.

In the context of all these causes, Justice ordered Benítez’s house arrest, although this was revoked on January 12 at the request of the Ayala family’s lawyer, Rodrigo Tripolone and the public prosecutor Marcela Dimundo, who denounced that the footballer had not respected the judicial measure of going in search of Anabelia, days before she committed suicide.

A story marked by violence

The death of Anabelia (29 years old) was discovered on the morning of January 1, when relatives found her without vital signs in her room.

According to her father, the young woman had spent the night of December 30 with Benítez, who had been placed under a 300 meter perimeter restriction due to a series of complaints of threats and gender violence.

Juan Carlos Ayala revealed Clarion who, after the death of his daughter, received an audio from Benítez’s relatives, in which they indicated that the former Boca player had a video call while Anabelia took her own life.

In that audio, a woman’s voice can be heard saying: “We couldn’t toast. We didn’t toast because she had an app through which Junior watched the girl hang herself.”

In this regard, Juan Carlos considered that “Benítez was one hundred percent responsible for what happened” and called for “justice to be done” for his death.