The United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Puerto Rico tonight charged boxer Félix “El Diamante” Verdejo Sánchez for the kidnapping and death of his extramarital partner, Keishla Rodríguez Ortiz, as well as for the death of his unborn child , and asked the Department of Justice in Washington DC to allow to seek the death penalty, if the defendant is found guilty.
Federal prosecutor Jonathan Gottfried filed a complaint tonight with three charges: kidnapping with death, carjacking with death and death of an unborn person. The complaint is an initial accusation mechanism that is followed by a grand jury indictment, once the case can be presented to that group of citizens. The prosecution’s request was to arrest the boxer immediately.
Today a certification was also filed before Magistrate Giselle López Soler. The charges of kidnapping and carjacking carry the death penalty as the maximum punishment but, “at the time of this filing, no decision has been made on whether to seek or not seek the death penalty”. The Puerto Rico prosecutor’s office would have to make a request to that effect to the central Department of Justice and there the decision is made whether or not the case continues as a death penalty. That punishment, which is decided by a jury other than the one that finds the accused guilty, has never been applied in the cases that the federal prosecutor’s office has handled in the district of Puerto Rico.
To support the complaint, the agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Lorenzo E. Vilanova Pérez, submitted an affidavit that is the first official version of the events that led to the death of Rodríguez Ortiz. The statement is based on information provided by a witness “with personal information, first hand”, who is not identified, but who is referred to as a male.
Verdejo Sánchez reportedly contacted the witness last Tuesday, April 27, to help him “end the victim’s pregnancy,” who had already informed him that she was pregnant, based on the result of a test. Last Thursday, the day of Rodríguez Ortiz’s disappearance, Verdejo Sánchez would have called her to meet her near the residence of her young woman. The fighter arrived at the scene with his black Dodge Durango suv that he obtained as part of a sponsorship arrangement for that brand of vehicles and that the police would later seize on Sunday morning.
Upon reaching the place, the woman got out of her Kia Forte, which was later found in Canóvanas, and got into the suv of her partner, with whom she had had a relationship since her teens, according to the family of the woman.
After an argument, “Verdejo (Sánchez) hit her with a fist on the face” and, together with her witness, they injected her with drugs bought at Luis Lloréns Torres complex. The boxer and the witness tied Rodríguez Ortiz’s hands and feet with cable and tied her to a cinder block. Verdejo Sánchez, in his Dodge, and the witness, in the victim’s Kia, drove to the Teodoro Moscoso Bridge.
Once on the bridge, Rodríguez Ortiz’s body was thrown from one side of the bridge into the water. “Verdejo (Sánchez) shot the victim with a pistol from the bridge,” and then the Kia was abandoned.
The cameras on the bridge that captured the movement of Verdejo Sánchez’s suv indicate that the episode there lasted between 8:29 am and 9:31 am. In addition, the police found a bullet casing at the scene.
Last Friday, while the country was attentive for hours to the discovery of the Kia in an area of Canóvanas and to the summons that the Police made to the boxer, the FBI obtained the records of calls and locations of both Rodríguez Ortiz’s and Verdejo Sánchez’s cell phones. . The analysis of the data places the cell phones of the boxer and his partner in the area of the bridge on Thursday morning. In the same way, this type of record also reflects calls and texts between Verdejo Sánchez and the witness between Wednesday and Thursday.
