The group of gunmen who arrived in the middle of the night yesterday at Residencial Villa Esperanza, in Cupey, Puerto Rico ordered those who would be their victims to stand up as if it were a firing squad.
Right there, the attackers shot them at close range, killing the five men who were talking about some electricity boxes, committing the second massacre that has occurred this year.
Jorge Luis Sánchez, 39, who was supposedly wanted to settle accounts for the alleged theft of a kilo of cocaine, began to run while his friends fell dejected to the ground.
The gunmen chased him to the third floor of the building where he actually lived and killed him.
According to the investigation, it was anticipated that Jorge Luis’s days were numbered and relatives had offered him money to go to the United States, and he rejected it.
It was the Police Commissioner himself, Antonio López Figueroa, who confirmed this morning that the information received indicates that the assassins went to claim the stolen drug.
In the Villa Esperanza complex, several decades had passed without a murder being recorded. Keishla Rodríguez lived there, the young woman who was murdered in April of last year, a case for which boxer Félix Verdejo is accused in federal court.
As a result of the massacre, López Figueroa instructed the commander of the San Juan Area, Colonel Orlando Rivera, to increase patrols in the sector.
The other victims were identified as Alexis Rafael Peralta, 33 years old; Janiel Morales Pérez, 34 years old; Jonathan Burgos Marrero, 40 years old; and Javier Oliver Olmos, all residents of Villa Esperanza.
The five men were among the electrical power distribution boxes where they were apparently sitting when the gunmen arrived and ordered them to stand up.
According to López Figueroa, all those killed had a criminal record, but only three of them – Peralta, Oliver Olmos and Sánchez – appear on file with the Police.
Several hooded gunmen, according to the Police, possibly in two cars, entered and killed them in seconds.
López Figueroa was at the scene of the crime and pointed out that “everything is linked to drug trafficking, supposedly one of the people appropriated a kilo of drugs and the situation arose, adults linked to this situation. The drug leaves death or jail. It saddens me to see young people… Most of the 10 murders (over the weekend) were drug related,” the commissioner said.
A team of agents from the Criminal Investigation Division led by Captain Luis Díaz Muñoz, director of that body, is in charge of the investigation.
