Maximum expectation in the Provincial Court of A Coruña in the final stretch of the trial for the murder of , when there are only two days left, until Friday, in which the three accusations and the five defenses will present their conclusions, before Monday Judge Elena Fernanda Pastor delivers to the popular jury the subject of the verdict on which it must pronounce next week. This Wednesday the statement of the three accused who have been in prison since they were arrested in July 2021 finally arrived. Their lawyers recommended that they not do so at first, as is usual and as the other two defendants did, the only ones who are on provisional release. Before testifying, during almost a month of trial, the three have been able to hear everything that has been exposed in the courtroom against them. This was their opportunity to tell their versions and sow doubts in the jury about their respective roles in the crime. They have cried, they have declared themselves “not guilty” of the crime of murder, and the two who admitted hitting Samuel at some point during the attack have asked for forgiveness.
Montaña, the young man from A Coruña who began the attack against Samuel Luiz, a 24-year-old nurse whom he did not know at all, in the drinking area in the early hours of July 3, 2021, faces a request for a 25-year sentence (22 for the murder and three for the aggravating circumstance of discrimination due to the sexual condition of the deceased, whom he repeatedly called a “faggot”). For Amaral, for his part, 27 years are requested, 22 for the murder and five for the violent theft of the victim’s mobile phone. Regarding Yumba, whom witnesses place holding Samuel by the neck, from behind, to put him at the mercy of Montaña’s blows, a sentence of 22 years behind bars as a co-author of the crime looms. This morning everyone has disassociated themselves from the final punches and kicks, that is, from the moment in which Samuel – with his head burst by what the coroner defined as cumulative hemorrhages for the sum of some 21 blows to the skull – was left collapsed and abandoned. on the ground while the stampede of the human pack that ended his life occurred.
The last to sit in front of the buses, this morning, was Diego Montaña, who was already 25 years old at the time of the events. Montaña, who has only answered his lawyer’s questions, has said like everyone else that he is “innocent” of Samuel’s death, but has confessed to having started the attack and having repeatedly hit his victim. However, he has hidden behind the gaps in his memory – regarding the night that changed his life definitively – to disassociate himself from the end of the fight, when Samuel received the definitive blow after which he collapsed and became brain dead due to The pressure in his skull was so great that it prevented blood from reaching him.
Montaña has stated that, in the Andén pub on the seafront in A Coruña, he drank almost the entire bottle of whiskey that he shared with his girlfriend, Katy. The doorman expelled him from the premises because of an argument he had with her, although he does not remember it clearly, and that was when he saw Samuel Luiz and his friend, Lina, on the stairs that lead to the beach. He believed, the accused has said, that it was “a couple” who was “recording” him. “The next image I have is hitting Samuel,” he said, “I don’t know if it was kicks or punches, I don’t have anything continuous from that night.”
“Then [al principio de la agresión mortal]In that image I have, it was only me” who hit, he admitted. Then “a crowd of many people formed, there was a lot of noise, I can’t deny anything but I can’t say what I did either,” the main defendant continued explaining his vague memories. “I hear people running, a lot of people around me,” “I don’t remember [haber participado en] no more altercation. “I can’t say no, but I can’t say yes either,” the defendant who has gesticulated the least and who has seemed most impassive during the previous sessions of this long trial has said, becoming emotional again and again. According to his version, with the loopholes he claims to have, Diego Montaña saw that the brawl moved (the attack continued, with Samuel trying to escape, along 150 meters of the promenade) towards the other side of the maritime avenue. “The moment I cross,” he continued, between sobs, “I see an image that I will never get out of my head for the rest of my life: Samuel’s body with three or four people” on his sides, “lying face up.” In the final moments of the group attack, the man who faces a 25-year sentence stands “about eight or 10 meters” from the body he sees lying on the road.
Montaña has said that he “truly” found out about the tragic end of the fight “the next day” in the press. “I was very scared, such a thing has never happened to me in my life, I deleted things from my phone, but I don’t even know what I deleted,” he justified the subsequent manipulation of his cell phone. And at the end of his statement he ended up collapsing: “What I want is to ask for forgiveness from Samuel’s family, because all this started because of me. “If I hadn’t started it, none of this would have happened and he would be alive.”
The victim’s cell phone
Kaio Amaral has admitted that he took the cell phone that he found “under a tree”, in the place where the attack began, with the intention of selling it. That weekend he even dismantled it to ship it in pieces, a practice that was not foreign to him because, as he confessed, he had already done it more times with other devices that he had appropriated, and he had already sold “more stolen things.” . He has also admitted that, in order not to hand it over to the police, he ended up throwing it away.
But according to his version, he never kicked, with his left leg, that the police say they see him preparing to kick Samuel in the video from an urban camera. Today his lawyer asked for that video to be played in the courtroom and took his time to calmly examine the scene. There is a streetlight in the middle that partially covers Amaral’s movements. “100%, I never touched Samuel, neither to take away his phone nor to hit him,” the accused, who faces 27 years in prison, stated, crying.
Kaio Amaral, confronted with his two former friends (Montaña and Yumba) since he pointed them out in his statement to the police, is being held in another penitentiary center. This Wednesday, he placed both of them in the attack again, and said that he tried to separate them. He has also stated that one of the minors already tried hit the group victim in the head with a weapon (the kubotán), but that he did not see Alejandro Míguez involved in the fight and that Katy Silva intervened, like him, “separating” Mountain.
Kaio, “about 20 meters away”
When the melee advanced along the promenade, Amaral insisted that he went after the group, accompanied by his girlfriend, following the fight, walking “calmly” at “about 20 meters, more or less.” Meanwhile, he has come to say, he was “yelling at them to stop.” In the end, he admitted, he came to see “how Samuel collapses”, with “no one around”, only protected by the two Senegalese migrants, the only people who really helped the victim during an attack that took place in full view of the people on the street According to Kaio, in the end he saw how “Yumba threw some punches at Magatte,” one of the Senegalese, and that was the end of it.
Shortly after, Kaio, with other members of the gang, went to the hospital because the girlfriend of one of them was suffering from alcohol poisoning. One of his colleagues told him that some girls had seen that “Samuel had been covered up,” but according to him he did not interpret that he was dead: “I didn’t give it any importance, to be honest, I thought it was a thermal blanket or something. “I didn’t think it was that serious, to be honest.”
The moment in which Kaio Amaral, the only one who responded to all parties, stopped being calm and his voice broke from crying was when the prosecutor asked him about his exculpatory publications, on Instagram, in the following days. “My mother called me very worried, she came to look for me at work because my photo is everywhere,” he recalled. “I uploaded a text to the networks and contacted acquaintances so they could publish it as well.” That writing, released into the air in the midst of the social commotion and demonstrations over a crime supposedly tinged with homophobia, said: “The recordings prove me right, I am not a homophobe, much less a murderer, at all times I tried to get them to leave it in peace”.
“I am very sorry, very sorry,” Alejandro Freire, the first defendant to testify this Wednesday before the jury made up of six women and three men, said through tears: “With my hand on my heart I want to apologize to all the people I that I have done harm and that I have been able to cause suffering. But I also want to say that I believe that Samuel did not die because of me.” Yumba has said that that fatal night he went out with a gram of cocaine but that “between invitations and such, in the end it would be like 10 or 15 lines.” To this, that morning he added more than half a bottle of whiskey and several beers. “Being sober I would never have attacked Samuel,” he stressed. “I grabbed him instinctively because I thought he was fighting with Diego, and we fell to the ground. “I didn’t strangle him or try to drown him.” Yumba, who once exposed Kaio Amaral, said today that he did not see his former friend hit Samuel. And he claimed his innocence at the beginning and at the end of his speech: “I declare myself innocent of the murder penalty of which I am accused.”
