Killing for a house: the ambition that precipitated the murder of the Tirado brothers and their uncle in the heart of Mexico City

Andrés and Jorge Tirado, in Mexico City.RR.SS.

The number 113 of Medellín street has become the scene of a crime that has once again brought out the worst face of violence in Mexico.

Three people were murdered behind black doors now guarded by two police officers and a handful of journalists hovering around waiting for some new information to scratch the opaque case.

The only thing certain is that Jorge Tirado, 35, his brother Andrés, 27, and his uncle, Luis González, 73, were found lifeless on Sunday, gagged and with signs of violence.

In addition, that three other people, two women and one man, have been arrested as suspects in the murder.

Until there, what could be, unfortunately, one more event in a country that accumulates dozens of homicides a day, thousands at the end of the year.

The unusual is the motive for the event and the perpetrators of the crime:

victims and suspects lived together for months in the same house.

The victims, according to sources from the Prosecutor's Office familiar with the investigation, were beaten, gagged and suffocated for refusing to hand over the property of the house to the suspects.

When the police arrived, in addition to the three bodies, they found González's wife, Margarita María Ochoa (72 years old), the only survivor, alive.

The first inquiries indicate that the house belonged to Ochoa's brother, who died last May.

On the ground floor lived a nurse — along with her daughter and her son-in-law — who took care of the deceased.

After the death of the owner, the caretaker tried to keep the property on the grounds that she had been a partner of the deceased, but she could not prove it for legal purposes, according to sources from the Prosecutor's Office.

Months later, González and his wife settled on the second floor of Medellín 113.

They moved from Jalisco while they carried out the necessary procedures to be able to sell the house.

Some time later, his nephews also arrived, the Tirado brothers.

The seven lived together for months,

A policeman guards the house where the lifeless remains of the Tirado brothers were found.

Monica Gonzalez Islands

This Friday all the alarms went off.

The young people's friends stopped having contact with them and began to launch search alerts on social networks.

Given the situation, a son of Ochoa and González, who lives in Jalisco, tried to contact his parents and his cousins ​​without success, so he decided to travel to Mexico City.

According to the sources consulted, when he arrived at the house, the nurse, his daughter, and his son-in-law did not let him in, so Ochoa's son filed a complaint for dispossession, the violent robbery of a property, before the Investigation Prosecutor's Office. Territorial in Cuauhtémoc, the neighborhood in which the Roma is located.

That clue was the definitive one: shortly after, 113 members of the Mexico City Security Secretariat went to Medellín, who were also prevented from passing.

It was not until they had a court order that they were able to access the property.

Given the contradictory versions of the nurse and her relatives, they were arrested as the main suspects in the crime.

The Tirado brothers were last seen Friday driving a gray 2021 Onyx with a Jalisco State license plate.

Their relatives and friends went looking for them without success from the first moment.

The following day his photographs began to be disseminated through social networks with the alert of the disappearance.

In Mexico, a country with more than 100,000 disappeared and an extensive wave of violence, the images could easily have been added to those of so many others without achieving greater relevance, but the two young men, a musician and an actor who were trying to make their way in their professions from Mexico City, were familiar faces.

The news spread like wildfire, and with it the pressure on the authorities to find them.

The first agents appeared on Saturday at Medellín 113. "From early the police would come and go, I think there were also relatives," explains the waiter at a restaurant on the same street, close to the house.

"On Saturday there was not so much police movement, but they were already investigating and asking questions," says a neighbor and worker in a nearby business who prefers not to give his name.

“Yesterday [Sunday] 20 police cars and vans arrived.

They came to ask us if we had noticed something strange, if we could support them with our security cameras, although we have already shown them and nothing out of the ordinary can be seen in the recordings, ”he continues.

On Friday, the day of the disappearance, the neighbor was out between three in the afternoon and two in the morning.

When he returned, everything was calm, there was nothing to suggest that there were four people kidnapped inside the building.

Not a noise, not a suspicious movement.

”It is curious because this street is closed on Fridays because there is an informal market on wheels: there is a lot of movement because there are many trucks of the stalls that are set up.

What has happened generates uneasiness ”.

Those detained by the Mexico City Attorney General's Office.

FGJCDMX

It is unknown why the murderers left Ochoa, the sister of the owner of the house, alive.

The woman, in any case, has claimed to have suffered violence.

Also that her bank cards were stolen.

The sources consulted assure that they have no evidence that more people intervened and assure that the material authors of the crime are the detainees.

The neighbor who prefers not to give his name remembers once speaking with the nurse.

“It is a very strange house, you almost never see movement, but the lady they have detained lived with her daughter.

In sidewalk talks she told my cleaning staff that she cared for the sick.

She went out from time to time to sweep, but the house was always closed like this, in the dark.

Like none of the neighbors interviewed, he does not recognize the Tirado brothers, who had arrived at the residence not long ago.

Another man, owner of a business at the end of the street, does claim to have seen González, his uncle: "He often passed by here and said hello, but little else."

The lifeless discovery of the three men and the shady case that he has uncovered leave more doubts than certainties for the moment.

For the moment, it seems that everything revolves around the house, a two-story building of gray stone, with a somewhat neglected facade and dirt marks.

One of those so common to see in Rome, bourgeois residences that are long past their days of splendor, but still retain vestiges of a somewhat stately past.

Now, in addition to a forgotten architectural relic, the building is also evidence, the scene and the probable cause of a crime to be clarified.

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